One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was written by Ken Kesey. The book is about a guy named Randle Patrick McMurphy. It all starts out where he goes to a mental hospital and is introduced to to Chief Bromden, who is also the half- indian narrator of the book. He has been in the hospital for ten years, he suffers from hallucinations and delusions. Bromden pretends to be deaf and dumb to be unnoticed, but he is six feet seven inches tall. It made it quite hard for him to be hidden from anything being the odd person out of everyone there because he just stuck out like a sore thumb. All of the mental patients are males and are divided into acutes who are curable, and chronics who can not be cured. Nurse Ratched is a nurse who runs the ward and everyone …show more content…
He finally realizes that some patients are stuck in a hospital until the staff decides they are cured. He begins to realize and accept that Nurse Ratched has authority to get him out sooner. Cheswick was a follower of McMurphy but he decides to not join him in the stand against Nurse Ratched. Cheswick then drowns in the pool and is counted as a suicidal act. After this incident that he has with one of his followers, he realizes that he is responsible for the other patients. He is slowly getting his strength and sanity taken away by this authority over all of the other guys in his ward(Kesey, …show more content…
He also makes arrangements for Billy Bibbit to have sexual encounters later on in the reading by making him date a prostitute from Portland(Kesey, 1962). In part four, back at the ward, McMurphy starts the rebellion by getting into a fist fight with the aids to help George Sorenson. Bromden decides to help and they are both sent to the disturbed ward for electroshock therapy. McMurphy acted as if the shock treatment did not hurt him and looked like an even bigger hero to the other guys, he made jokes about it. After all of this stuff went down he did not want to let Billy down so he bribes Mr. Turkle to let Candy into the building. Billy had sexual encounters with the lady while everyone else smoked and drank to have a good night(Kesey, 1962). The next morning Nurse Ratched was not very happy to find Billy with Candy and threatens to tell his mother. Billy slits his throat committing suicide after that happens. Later that evening Bromden suffocates McMurphy in his bed enabling him to die happy, but in the meantime he escapes from the hospital by breaking through a window(Kesey, 1962).
The bag is a representation of how Nurse Ratched herself gives orders to everyone in the ward and they have no choice, but to follow it or else they can be put into the “Combine” as Bromden sees it. Near the end of the novel “she turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station and closed the door behind her”. When the nurse “walked” away, it shows how she no longer cares and Bromden will then start having a sense of feeling that he should do something because she just let Billy kill himself. The moment when Nurse Ratched “close[s] the door” is a sign for Bromden to gather his courage and help everyone get out of this ward. The novel that Kesey wrote is focused on how Bromden’s past memories should not let him down, but to gather his strength and let go of the past to start anew.
“The scalding water of the delousing station brings on a flashback of Billy being bathed by his mother, but his gurgling and cooing is then interrupted by a flash-forward of Billy playing golf and Billy being told that he is ‘trapped in another blob of amber’ and has no free will. In both incidents, Billy accepts the lure of infancy but is propelled back into adult hood” (Page
From the moment McMurphy enters the ward it is clear to all that he is different and hard to control. He’s seen as a figure the rest of the patients can look up to and he raises their hopes in taking back power from the big nurse. The other patients identify McMurphy as a leader when he first stands up to the nurse at her group therapy, saying that she has manipulated them all to become “a bunch of chickens at a pecking party”(Kesey 55). He tells the patients that they do not have to listen to Nurse Ratched and he confronts her tactics and motives. The patients see him as a leader at this point, but McMurphy does not see the need for him to be leading alone. McMurphy is a strong willed and opinionated man, so when he arrives at the ward he fails to comprehend why the men live in fear, until Harding explains it to him by
McMurphy’s resistance against Nurse Ratched begins to awaken Bromden’s own ability to resist the grip of the nurse. Bromden slowly starts to see that he is an individual that possesses his own free will; in turn the fog begins to fade. Through Clarisse’s love of nature she begins to open Montag up to a world outside conformity. She see’s that Montag is not like everyone else and that he has the potential to become a free thinking individual. Clarisse is able to force Montag to confront his deeper issues with reality eventually making him realize his own potential.
One of the ways Billy shows his ineffective ways of dealing with death is by using Risa Walker as sexual escape from his daily life. For example he shows himself using Risa Walker for pleasure when he admits, “So, instead, we said, “I love you,”, and let it go at that” (Banks 40). Spending time with Risa is daily escape for Billy. It is the one time of the day where he completely forgets about the bad things that have happened in his life and focusses on Risa. Billy does not really like her but is using her for his sexual pleasure after his wife is dead. It is not like they love each other it is more like they need each other because they are both burdened with stron...
As he tries to conform to the ways of the hospital, he actually becomes more like the patients that he detests. In one last attempt to escape from the hospital, McMurphy uses his cunning wit and skills as a con man to persuade the orderly into opening a window to allow two women into the ward. As the nigh progresses and he has the perfect opportunity to flee he realizes the hospital is the only safe place to stay. Due to Randal McMurphy rebellious ways and non-conformist ideas, the hospital performs a lobotomy, which during the time of this movie, w...
Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ed. John Clark Pratt. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1996. Print. Viking Critical Library.
In this novel Kesey has used narrative structure, foreshadowing and symbolism to create the tragic form and to show he downfall of McMurphy throughout the novel. As the down fall of McMurphy progresses throughout the novel his ideas got stronger and at the end of the novel his death reinforced his ideas even more, defeating the Big Nurse due to patients signing out form the ward for freedom. Her control over the ward was shattered when the Chief used the control panel to escape from the ward. The electroshock therapy table was one of the major reason of McMurphy not able to escape the ward.
One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a movie that portrays a life story of a criminal named McMurphy who is sent to a mental institution because he believes that he himself is insane. While McMurphy is in the mental ward, he encounters other patients and changes their perception of the “real” world. Before McMurphy came to the mental ward, it was a place filled with strict rules and orders that patients had to follow; these rules were created by the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. However, once McMurphy was in the ward, everything, including the atmosphere, changed. He was the first patient to disobey Nurse Ratched. Unlike other patients who continuously obeyed Nurse Ratched, McMurphy and another patient named Charlie Cheswick decided to rebel
After the introduction by the Chief, the story proceeds to a normal morning at the ward. The patients are sitting in the Day Room after their morning pills. Then a new patient, Randall McMurphy, checks in. McMurphy was a big redheaded man who loved to gamble and got transferred to the ward from a work farm. From the beginning, McMurphy had been hard to control. He refused any of the traditional check in routines that any new patient needed to follow including taking his admission shower. The Black Boys, the orderlies of the ward, went to get Nurse Ratched in attempt to put McMurphy in line.
Randle McMurphy is in a constant battle within himself, he is portrayed as a sociopath. He does not base his actions off of whether they will affect those around him, instead does as he pleases. His actions are based off of what is best for himself. McMurphy was first introduced as a savior to the ward, He soon uses the patients for his own benefit, the patients look up to him as one of their new proclaimed leader. McMurphy inspires hope into them and make them want to stand up for themselves. This give
Even though McMurphy's own sacrifice of life is the price of his victory, he still attempts to push the ward patients to hold thier own personal opinions and fight for what is ethically right. For instinace, McMurphy states, "But I tried though,' he says. 'Goddammit, I sure as hell id that much, now didn't I?" McMurphy strains to bring the 'fellas' courage and determination in a place full of inadequacy and "perfection." McMurphy obtains a lot of courage in maintaining his own sort of personal integrity, and trying to keep the guys' intergrity and optimistic hope up.
Additionally, we learn that while he was recuperating, his wife died of carbon-monoxide poisoning trying to get to the hospital to see him. The entire story is basically told in Chapter 2.It is also in this chapter that Billy,"time-travels for the 1st time The series of scenes and fragmentations of Billy 's life in chapter 2 alone unnerving. Had we leaned the corse of events in a normal chronological sequence, rather than tidbit here and there, the events would have been m,ore understandable. We learn of his wife 's death in chapter 2, yet we learn the full circumstances of her death in chapter
Unable to see McMurphy imprisoned in a body that will go on living (under Nurse Ratched’s control) even though his spirit is gone, Chief smothers him to death that night. Then he escapes the hospital and leaves for Canada and a new life. We begin to see the different situations in which the patients struggle to overcome. Whether insane or not, the hospital is undeniably in control of the fates of its
Initially the ward is run as if it was a prison ward, but from the moment the brawling, gambling McMurphy sets foot on the ward it is identified that he is going to cause havoc and provide change for the patients. McMurphy becomes a leader, a Christ like figure and the other patients are his disciples. The person who is objective to listen to his teachings at first is Chief Bromden (often called Bromden), but then he realizes that he is there to save them and joins McMurphy and the Acutes (meaning that they have possibility for rehabilitation and release) in the protest against Nurse Ratched, a bureaucratic woman who is the protagonist of the story, and the `Combine' (or society).