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¶ … Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is set in a mental hospital in the 1960's. The main character, Randle Partick McMurphy has conned his way into the hospital trying to get an easier sentence from his most recent encounter with the law. There he discovers life is no picnic for the patients, mainly due to the head nurse, Nurse Ratched, who runs the wards more like torture rooms than a hospital. Chief Bromden is a six foot two Indian who has pretended to be deaf and dumb for the past thirty years. The story is told in first person narration by Bromden (Kesey 1979).
McMurphy rebels against Nurse Ratched and her ward rules every chance he gets and soon rallies the other...
Bromden begins to speaks again. McMurphy also takes up their causes as well, and helps a young virgin boy meet a woman in his room for sex. When Nurse Ratched discovers them, she threatens to tell his mother. The boy, being terrified of his mother's disapproval, kills himself. McMurphy lashes into Rached, nearly strangling her. She orders a lobotomy for McMurphy. When he returns unable to move or speak, Bromden suffocates him with a pillow and then flees to his reservation (Kesey 1979).
The theme of the book is rebellion against conformity, the individual against society. It shows how we allow ourselves and others to be placed in pigeon holes from fear of disturbing the status…
Works Cited
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Penguin USA. July 1979.
Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest offers an ironic portrayal of mental health and mental illness. The story of Randle McMurphy, told through the eyes and ears of Chief Bromden, shows how restrictive social norms and behavioral constraints are what cause mental illness. Mental illness and deviance are socially constructed. The men in the institution have been labeled as deviants, many of them as criminals too. Yet
Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey was written after its author worked as an orderly in a psychiatric ward. Yet the novel also demonstrates significant research that manages to elevate it to the level of a serious critique. Published in 1962, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is thus an artistic contribution to that decade's emerging critique of societal handling of mental illness, a loose affiliation
Despite his being the most lucid among the inmates, he was still not immune to psychiatric intervention that led to his eventual defeat against Nurse Ratched. This makes society all the more oppressive, not accepting any dissent or differing perspective and eliminating those it cannot subdue. Thus, the story resonates Szasz's argument that mental illness is a myth and that psychiatry is a practice masquerading as a science to
It is through this opportunity that the novelist reveals the extent to which Nurse Ratchet actually dominates the rest of the staff as much as she dominates the daily lives of the patients. In some ways, she represents the hypocrisy of mental institutions, especially in that day and age. Specifically, the outward appearance of the institution and of all of its employees (including the nurses) is perfectly clean and
For his trouble, Murphy receives a frontal lobotomy as a "treatment" for his unwillingness to cooperate and abide by the rules and norms, a touch that gives him a Christ-like quality that gives his ultimate fate as that of a martyr to the cause of the promotion of humanity. Indeed, humanity is ultimately indebted to those brave few in the human race who defiantly dare to confront and challenge
The fog is actually generated by two painful experiences in Chief's past: first, the fog in his mind is a recurrence of the brain treatments ordered by Nurse Ratched, and secondly, the fog is a direct reference to the actual fog machine of World War II operated by military intelligence in order to obscure what was occurring on the airfield (Lupack 70) as Chief recalls: "Whenever intelligence figured there