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One flew over the cuckoo's nest psychosocial
What did Ken Kesey want the reader to think about in One Flew Oer the Cuckoos Nest
One flew over the cuckoo's nest psychosocial
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Ken Kesey, is a psychological drama that forces readers to look at a mental ward, and the inmates, with a different perspective. The novel is perceived through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a native american who pretends to be deaf to listen to the whispers of the ward. Life in this prison-like facility is full of scrutiny and both physical and mental abuse from “The Big Nurse”, Nurse Rached. However, when a new inmate by the name of McMurphy enters the hospital, her power is called into question through his leadership and rebellion. Kesey uses McMurphy, Bromden, and the other inmates to call into question how far one would go for a cause they believe in. Ronald Wallace talks about laughter as a cure …show more content…
in The Last Laugh. Raymond Olderman talks about “the wasteland” in terms of as “institution” and as “conspiracy” and McMurphy as the “Grail Knight” in “Beyond the Wasteland”. Furthermore, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest presents, through biblical symbolism, the thought that rebellion, and spiritual or physical personal sacrifice, can save those we care about. In One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Kesey portrays McMurphy as a messianic figure. He leads characters such as Chief Bromden, Billy Bibbit, and Ellis to everlasting freedom. Throughout the novel, McMurphy leads the group in rising up against the iron fist Nurse Rached lays down. He stands as a Christ-like figure to them, whom will be their savior. Before entering the ward McMurphy is baptized with a shower. McMurphy also notices Ellis, a character who always in a cross-position "nailed against the wall, arms out," (Kesey 20). A little while later when McMurphy is given his first electric shock therapy, he lays down on a “crossed shaped” table. The doctor, Fredrickson, makes the remark to McMurphy, “You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns.” (Kesey 53) Kesey ties in Christian symbols of the cross and crown of thorns into McMurphy’s suffering for the greater good, furthering the parallel between McMurphy’s rebellion and Jesus’ salvation in changing the current way of life. Kesey portrays McMurphy as a Christ figure by recreating Jesus’s fishing trip with his twelve disciples.
McMurphy takes the twelve “disciples” onto the boat and towards the sea. Fish has been known to be an important religious Christian symbol, and the new crew becomes “fishers of men”. Billy Bibbit is an important character in the novel that is portrayed as disciples Peter and Judas. He is told to be a fisher of men. McMurphy then gets Candy and Mary, two prostitutes, comes into the ward and party and drink alcohol with the patients. The very next day, Billy Bibbet is confronted about his night with Candy and he betrays McMurphy three times. Nurse Ratched asks …show more content…
about the night and he exclaims, “No! It wasn’t me! McMurphy did it!” (Kesey 264) and blames the whole scene on McMurphy. As a result of his betrayal, Billy Bibbit then kills himself just as the disciple Judas did when he betrayed Jesus to the Romans for crucifixion. McMurphy can’t allow Nurse Ratched to use Billy Bibbits death to regain control over the patients. McMurphy could not let what he had taught the patients and what they gained be forgotten so attacks Nurse Ratched, choking her, making the ultimate sacrifice of his life so the patients could have eternal strength and saves them. McMurphy has taught them enough so that Nurse Ratched could no longer “rule with her old power anymore.” (Kesey269) This recreation of The Last Supper is one of many ways McMurphy takes the role as a Christ symbol, the night before crucifixion, in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Kesey has more Christian symbols in McMurphys death.
McMurphy is taken to his room for his “crucifixion” in the lobotomy lab after his attack on Nurse Ratched. He is placed on the cross-shaped table and asks, “Do I get my crown of thorns?” (Kesey 218). McMurphy is now even identifying himself as a Christ figure in his death. He is in the same position Ellis foreshadowed throughout the whole novel. Before his lobotomy a patient says to McMurphy, “I wash my hands of the whole deal” just as Pontius Pilate, said to Jesus before sentencing him to death. As McMurphys soul leaves his body, his spirit is lived through the patients to free them from the hell they’re trapped in.
Nurse Ratched states, “He will be back,” about McMurphy referring to his resurrection as his spirit lives on through his disciples. (Kesey 320) McMurphy also performs miracle acts by metaphorically making the blind see again and the mute speak. The Chief was the oldest patient in the ward a pretended to be deaf his entire stay. McMurphy gives Chief hope that life doesn’t mean fitting into the “combine” system. The Combine system is the matrix within the ward that takes control over the patients allowing them to not live or see meaning in their life. There is symbolism of hell as the combine system is described as a “huge room of endless machines stretching clear out of sight, swarming with sweating, shirtless men running up and down catwalks, faces blank and dreamy in firelight thrown from a hundred blast furnaces.” (Kesey 67) The Chief tells the story how his father was a big man, but when the system overpowered his individuality he became a small man. McMurphy asked if they killed his father because of the lifelessness in Chiefs story. McMurphy knew he couldn’t let himself and the other patients worked on. This is evident as the chief has been reduced to small person within the system but Murphy showed him the meaning in life and reestablished his identity. McMurphy made the Chief feel as tall a mountain and people could see him again. Kesey also portrays McMurphy as a comedic figure that uses comic relief to reestablish the patients’ identity leading to their eternal freedom. McMurphy uses laughter as medication in his process. In the bible, Proverbs 17:22 says, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” McMurphys laughter is described by Chief Bromden as “free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it's lapping against the walls all over the ward…. This sounds real. I realize it's the first laugh I've heard in years." (Kesey 10) The system is making the feel as if they can’t be themselves and have to be serious to be seen as a functional member of society. This kind of system takes away from their identity and restricts the patients. The inmates are mentally trapped in this constitution of power. Comedy is a means of coping and allows them to laugh at the microcosm they are locked in. In the grand schemes of life, the institution is a miniscule factor in their overall life. McMurphy begins his rebellion in a comical form towards Nurse Ratched to show that she can’t take away his identity through the power in the system. In fact, with the help of comedy, the patients “disability” is an advantage on perspective in dealing with an institution made based off mechanisms of power in “normal” society in Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction by Barbra Lupack. However, having a mental illness allows the inmates to see different things, interpret different things, and respond differently to strict power. He works on the edge of system by letting them here the sound of self-joy. Bryan Stone talks about how the satisfaction theory tends to be more “objective” in Faith and (Stone 103). McMurphy exclaims, “A man go around lettin’ a woman whup him up and down till he can’t laugh any more, and he loses one of the biggest edges he’s got on his side. First thing you know he’ll begin to think she’s tougher than he is…” (Kesey 54) Without the medicine of laughter provided by McMurphy, The Chief “knew you couldn’t really be strong until you can see a funny side of things.” (Kesey 185) He teaches characters to laugh at what hurts them so that they can maintain balance within themselves and not allow the world drive you crazy. Olderman portrays the spiritual and physical death of McMurphy as the journey of “The Grail Knight” and aleader and sacrificial savior of his own people in a chapter of his a chapter of his novel, “Beyond the Wasteland”. He saves the patients of mental imprisonment through his rebellion, laughter, and his ultimate sacrifice. Ultimately, ”the departure of the Grail Knight means he has been defeated. He departs bot to affirm life, but to survive as a disposed man.” (Olderman 114) McMurphy frees them by teaching the characters the meaning of life and even gave his life for what he believed in. In the end of the novel, Chief remembers what he was taught and knows that being a vegetable is not a lifestyle. Chief Bromden kills McMurphy, freeing his spirit from his body. This action indicates that McMurphy’s message was understood and he did his job, allowing Chief to escape the pits of hell, also known as an Oregon psychiatric hospital. With the inclusion of McMurphys “baptism”, fishing trip, Last Supper, betrayal of a loyal follower, spiritual and physical death, and resurrection, Ken Kesey portrays R.P. McMurphy as a Christ figure in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The author Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado and went to Stanford University. He volunteered to be used for an experiment in the hospital because he would get paid. In the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, Kesey brings up the past memories to show how Bromden is trying to be more confident by using those thoughts to make him be himself. He uses Bromden’s hallucinations, Nurse Ratched’s authority, and symbolism to reveal how he’s weak, but he builds up more courage after each memory.
The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey tells a story of Nurse Ratched, the head nurse of a mental institution, and the way her patients respond to her harsh treatment. The story is told from the perspective of a large, Native-American patient named Bromden; he immediately introduces Randle McMurphy, a recently admitted patient, who is disturbed by the controlling and abusive way Ratched runs her ward. Through these feelings, McMurphy makes it his goal to undermine Ratched’s authority, while convincing the other patients to do the same. McMurphy becomes a symbol of rebellion through talking behind Ratched’s back, illegally playing cards, calling for votes, and leaving the ward for a fishing trip. His shenanigans cause his identity to be completely stolen through a lobotomy that puts him in a vegetative state. Bromden sees McMurphy in this condition and decides that the patients need to remember him as a symbol of individuality, not as a husk of a man destroyed by the
In Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest there are many recurring motifs and images. One very prominent motif is laughter. Following the motif of laughter throughout the novel, it is mostly associated with McMurphy and power/control. McMurphy teaches the patients how to laugh again and with the laughter the combine loses control and the patients gain their power back.
Chief Bromden, who is presumably deaf and dumb, narrates the story in third person. Mr. McMurphy enters the ward all smiles and hearty laughter as his own personal medicine. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a story about patients in a psychiatric hospital, who are under the power of Nurse Ratched. Mrs. Ratched has control over all the patients except for Mr. McMurphy, who uses laughter to fight her power. According to Chief Bromden, McMurphy "...knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy" (212). Laughter is McMurphy's medicine and tool to get him and the rest of the patients through their endless days at the hospital. The author's theme throughout the novel is that laughter is the best medicine, and he shows this through McMurphy's static character. The story is made up of series of conflicts between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. McMurphy becomes a hero, changing the lives of many of the inmates. In the end, though, he pays for his actions by suffering a lobotomy, which turned him into a vegetable. The story ends when Bromden smothers McMurphy with a pillow and escapes to freedom.
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest explores the dysfunctions and struggles of life for the patients in a matriarch ruled mental hospital. As told by a schizophrenic Native American named Chief Bromden, the novel focuses primarily on Randle McMurphy, a boisterous new patient introduced into the ward, and his constant war with the Big Nurse Ratched, the emasculating authoritarian ruler of the ward. Constricted by the austere ward policy and the callous Big Nurse, the patients are intimidated into passivity. Feeling less like patients and more like inmates of a prison, the men surrender themselves to a life of submissiveness-- until McMurphy arrives. With his defiant, fearless and humorous presence, he instills a certain sense of rebellion within all of the other patients. Before long, McMurphy has the majority of the Acutes on the ward following him and looking to him as though he is a hero. His reputation quickly escalates into something Christ-like as he challenges the nurse repeatedly, showing the other men through his battle and his humor that one must never be afraid to go against an authority that favors conformity and efficiency over individual people and their needs. McMurphy’s ruthless behavior and seemingly unwavering will to protest ward policy and exhaust Nurse Ratched’s placidity not only serves to inspire other characters in the novel, but also brings the Kesey’s central theme into focus: the struggle of the individual against the manipulation of authoritarian conformists. The asylum itself is but a microcosm of society in 1950’s America, therefore the patients represent the individuals within a conformist nation and the Big Nurse is a symbol of the authority and the force of the Combine she represents--all...
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest takes place in a mental institution in the Pacific Northwest. The narrator of the novel is Chief Bromden, also known as Chief Broom, a catatonic half-Indian man whom everybody thinks is deaf and dumb. He often suffers from hallucinations in which he feels that the room is filled with fog. The institution is dominated by Nurse Ratched (Big Nurse), a cold, precise woman with calculated gestures and a calm, mechanical manner. When the story begins, a new patient, Randall Patrick McMurphy, arrives at the ward. He is a self-professed 'gambling fool' who has just come from a work farm at Pendleton. He introduces himself to the other men on the ward, including Dale Harding, the president of the patient's council, and Billy Bibbit, a thirty-year old man who stutters and appears very young. Nurse Ratched immediately pegs McMurphy as a manipulator.
Ken Kesey presents his masterpiece, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, with popular culture symbolism of the 1960s. This strategy helps paint a vivid picture in the reader's mind. Music and cartoons of the times are often referred to in the novel. These help to exaggerate the characters and the state of the mental institution.
The choice that a novelist makes in deciding the point of view for a novel is hardly a minor one. Few authors make the decision to use first person narration by secondary character as Ken Kesey does in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. By choosing Bromden as narrator instead of the central character of Randle Patrick McMurphy, Kesey gives us narration that is objective, that is to say from the outside of the central character, and also narration that is subjective and understandably unreliable. The paranoia and dementia that fill Bromden's narration set a tone for the struggle for liberation that is the theme of the story. It is also this choice of narrator that leads the reader to wonder at the conclusion whether the story was actually that of McMurphy or Bromden. Kesey's choice of narrative technique makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest a successful novel.
Many social issues and problems are explored in Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Perhaps the most obvious complaint against society is the treatment of the individual. This problem of the individual versus the system is a very controversial topic that has provoked great questioning of the government and the methods used to treat people who are unable to conform to the government's standards.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a compelling tale that brings a warning of the results of an overly conformist and repressive institution. As the narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden, a paranoid half- Native American Indian man, has managed to go unnoticed for ten years by pretending to be deaf and dumb as a patient at an Oregon mental asylum. While he towers at six feet seven inches tall, he has fear and paranoia that stem from what he refers to as The Combine: an assemblage whose goal is to force society into a conformist mold that fits civilization to its benefit. Nurse Ratched, a manipulative and impassive former army nurse, dominates the ward full of men, who are either deemed as Acute (curable), or Chronic (incurable). A new, criminally “insane” patient named Randle McMurphy, who was transferred from the Pendleton Work Farm, eventually despoils the institution’s mechanical and monotonous schedule through his gambling, womanizing, and rollicking behavior.
Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is a story about a band of patients in a mental ward who struggle to find their identity and get away from the wretched Nurse. As audiences read about the tale, many common events and items seen throughout the story actually represent symbols for the bigger themes of the story. Symbols like the fishing trip, Nurse, and electroshock therapy all emphasize the bigger themes of the story. The biggest theme of the story is oppression. Throughout the course of the story, patients are suppressed and fight to find who they really are.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ed. John Clark Pratt. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1996. Print. Viking Critical Library.
The author of One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest, allows the reader to explore different psychoanalytic issues in literature. The ability to use works literature to learn about real world conflicts allows us to use prior knowledge to interact with these problems in reality. Ken Kesey, the author of the above novel and Carl Jung, author of “The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious” wrote how the mind can be easily overtaken by many outside factors from the past or present. The novel takes place in an asylum that is aimed to contain individuals that have a mental issue or problem. The doctors and care takers are seen as tyrants and barriers that inhibit the patients to improve their health, while the patients are limited by their initial conditions
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey is a book about an Indian named Chief who tells his experience in a mental hospital. While he was there, he met a rowdy guy who was named McMurphy. In the mental hospital, Chief acted as if he was deaf and dumb, people had always treated him that way so he stayed like that; even though he wasn’t like that. He’s been in that hospital for 10 years, traumatized by the taking of his home, the Cecilio Falls. The reason why the government shouldn’t have built the dam and taken the Indian Village is because people were already living near the falls for generations. They were taking their source of food and trade, taking their homes, taking everything away from them. But the townspeople who lived not far
The madman is the perfect enigma: misunderstood, irrational, and outcast. If so, what could the sane glean from the not-so-sane, especially about the very society they reject? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, may provide a telling answer. By narrating from the perspective of a mental ward patient and exposing the pitfalls of psychiatric care, Kesey’s masterwork proves compelling for this aspiring Psychology student.