Use Of Power In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Misuse of power(Final)

Ken Kesey is a famous American novelist who wrote a well-known novel in America, commonly known as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was first published in 1962. The idea of writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came from a real-life experience of Kesey while he was working at Veterans Administration Mental Hospital. The characters in this book are divided into many different parts which make the story even more clear for readers to understand easily. The stories in this book are dealing with control while the mental hospital is the place where control leads to destruction. The major antagonist in the novel is Nurse Ratched who is a former army nurse, now working for the mental hospital and since she is in charge

On the other hand, McMurphy is a patient in the hospital, who constantly challenges the control of Nurse Ratched, while she tries to show she remains in control. Even though mental illness is the major issue in this book, the function of matriarchal system hurts the male patients in many ways.

The over-developed ego of Nurse Ratched leads her leadership into destruction. The mental hospital is the place which is fully ruled by women or the place where women have power. Nurse Ratched manipulates her power over patients in many negative ways; having the patients “spy on each other” is one of her common ways of achieving those things that patients want her to know. While McMurphy and most of the members in the hospital agree to watch the baseball game, Nurse Ratched did not allow them to do so even though most of the members in the hospital including McMurphy want to watch that series so bad; which shows that Nurse Ratched is a person who does not care about others feelings and their difficulties. In the novel, she is described as a person who can “set the wall clock to whatever speed she wants” (Kesey 68). Which is the representation of

Bibit is another female character who destroyed Billy’s freedom by keeping him a virgin until the age of thirty-one. Bibit destroys Billy’s independent growth by using him as a power source as a mom over her own son; loving a child does not mean keeping children's freedom and making them depend on the parents forever. Even though Bibbit knows that her son is adult enough to be able to function in a society by himself, still she keeps him under her control by telling him “Sweetheart, you still have scads of time for things like that. Your whole life is ahead of you”(Kesey 268) such as going to college. In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest novelist Ken Kesey clams, ‘“Mother, I’m th-th-thirty-one years old! ‘she laughed and twiddled his ear with the weed. Sweetheart, do I look like the mother of a middle-aged man?”’ (Kesey 268). This quote proves that she does not understand her son’s capability or his ability to handle his daily life struggle and have the ability to live his life outside the family zone. By keeping her son constantly stuck or preventing him from being adult proves that she is not just making him live like an animal but also destroying the happiness of other men in society, just like Nurse Ratched gets her power by keeping her male patients under her control. As a result of his mom’s control, Billy living his life as a dependent man and feeling unsafe, and instead of being himself in the outside world he remains in a ward.