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One flew over the cuckoo's nest summary psychology
One flew over the cuckoos nest character analysis
One flew over the cuckoo's nest summary psychology
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In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, there are many characters who feel trapped or scared. Billy Bibbit is one of them. Billy was voluntarily put into the mental health ward, but feels he can never leave due to what the people in the ward made him think of the outside world. Billy’s fear of the world stems from how he is treated inside the ward by his peers. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Billy shows it is necessary to have control over life to be happy. This is shown through Billy’s interactions with Nurse Ratched, his mother, and the men in the ward. Billy constantly feels bad about the choices he makes. While Billy is in the ward, he is surrounded by many strong women who are all in charge. The main nurse, Nurse Ratched, is constantly watching over him due to her relationship with his mother, who doesn’t want him to grow up. With these expectations from his mother and Nurse Ratched, Billy conforms into a thirty year old man who is afraid to think for himself. Billy is still a virgin when he enters the ward, due to his mother not letting him think for himself. This causes Billy to constantly feel guilty and unhappy when he makes choices for himself, because those around him made him believe that he does not deserve to make his own choices. When Billy finally did something for himself …show more content…
McMurphy, the new man in the ward shows Billy how to speak his mind and how to do what makes him happy. McMurphy is also the man that encourages Billy to go sleep with the woman who snuck into the ward at night. The men’s support in the ward encourages Billy unlike his mother or Nurse Ratched. Their support shapes Billy into a man who is less afraid, and happier with his choices. Billy’s happiness after finally doing what he wants shows that that small amount of control he had over his life made him
Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, is a novel containing the theme of emotions being played with in order to confine and change people. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is about a mental institution where a Nurse named Miss Ratched has total control over its patients. She uses her knowledge of the patients to strike fear in their minds. Chief Bromden a chronic who suffers from schizophrenia and pretends to be deaf and mute narrates the novel. From his perspective we see the rise and fall of a newly admitted patient, RP McMurphy. McMurphy used his knowledge and courage to bring changes in the ward. During his time period in the ward he sought to end the reign of the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched, also to bring the patients back on their feet. McMurphy issue with the ward and the patients on the ward can be better understood when you look at this novel through a psychoanalytic lens. By applying Daniel Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence to McMurphy’s views, it is can be seen that his ideas can bring change in the patients and they can use their
In my opinion the main theme of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is conformity. The patients at this mental institution, or at least the one in the Big Nurse’s ward, find themselves on a rough situation where not following standards costs them many privileges being taken away. The standards that the Combine sets are what makes the patients so afraid of a change and simply conform hopelessly to what they have since anything out of the ordinary would get them in trouble. Such conformity is what Mc Murphy can not stand and makes him bring life back to the ward by fighting Miss Ratched and creating a new environment for the patients. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest represents a rebellion against the conformity implied in today’s society.
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.
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...
Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is a work of literature that explores the concept of falsely diagnosing an individual who is sane. Randle Patrick McMurphy clearly falls into this concepts exhibited throughout the novel. McMurphy, a rebellious and rowdy man, enters a mental hospital. His singing and laughing could be heard throughout the ward. This fiery redhead challenges Nurse Ratched policies on the ward, and makes numerous attempts to get the patients on the ward to rebel against her. He disobeys Ratched’s rules by gambling inside the ward, helping Billy Bibbit lose his virginity, and allowing prostitutes to roam the hallways freely at night. McMurphy’s attempts to break free from Ratched’s dictatorship slowly starts to wane. McMurphy, later, gets into a violent fight with one of Ratched’s
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey has created complex characters that can be seen through the lens of psychology, in particular through the Freudian theories including Oedipus complex. Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex is portrayed through character Billy Bibbit, who is the antagonist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. According to Freudian Theory, human behavior and personality develops through three specific stages: id, ego, and superego. One is able to understand the characters and their psychology by having a knowledge of Oedipus complex and Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory. This novel successfully explores the intricacy of human nature and how the psychological process functions through the development of the characters. It is
Josh Shipp says that “you either get bitter or you get better. It's that simple. You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you.” This is true for Bob Sheldon from the novel “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton. Bob Sheldon is a 18 boy who lives with only the struggle of his spoiling parents. Bob’s coping of this physical conflict shape him into a spoiled and reckless individual who his two-faced.
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 Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a captivating film about a group of men in an Oregon psychiatric hospital desperately trying to get better, well most of them at least. A variety of different mental illnesses were easily perceived from many of the patients that resided in this hospital, the majority of these illnesses seemed to be either clinical depression or a personality disorder, although two main characters presented a challenge.
He attempts to create excitement within the asylum by organizing a party where he invites two strippers Sandy and Candy (Kesey 247). However, all the positive feelings from that night go up in smoke when she shames Billy into confessing who the mastermind of the party was by using her relationship with his mother (Kesey 264). This causes Billy to kill himself by slitting his throat, and she uses this tragedy to abase McMurphy, saying “the poor miserable, misunderstood boy killed himself…First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives¾gambling with human lives¾ as if you thought yourself to be a God” (Kesey 266). These words seem to destroy McMurphy, a man who is only trying to make the lives of the inmates more exciting and worth living. He would have blamed himself for Billy’s death and probably Cheswick’s as well before she said it, but her saying it makes him have to confront the reality that if he had never come, they both probably would have still been alive. McMurphy snaps for the final time; he “smashed through the glass door…grabbed for her and ripped her uniform…He gave a cry…A sound of cornered-animal fear and hat and surrender and defiance” (Kesey 267). Soon after he is taken up to the Disturbed Ward where he is lobotomized and made a vegetable. Finally, to set McMurphy free forevermore, Chief suffocates him (Kesey 270). In summation, the manipulation and aggressive personality and tactics of Nurse Ratched causes McMurphy, a relatively normal spirited, yet stubborn man, to go into a violent rage and to truly become
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
Billy Bibbit is characterized as a young man who manifests his lack of confidence with a stutter. Nurse Ratched, the matron
There were no heroes on the psychiatric ward until McMurphy's arrival. McMurphy gave the patients courage to stand against a truncated concept of masculinity, such as Nurse Ratched. For example, Harding states, "No ones ever dared to come out and say it before, but there is not a man among us that does not think it. That doesn't feel just as you do about her, and the whole business feels it somewhere down deep in his sacred little soul." McMurphy did not only understand his friends/patients, but understood the enemy who portrayed evil, spite, and hatred. McMurphy is the only one who can stand against the Big Nurse's oppressive supreme power. Chief explains this by stating, "To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as sson as you loose once, she's won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that." McMuprhy's struggle for hte patient's free will is a disruption to Nurse Ratched's social order. Though she holds down her guard she yet is incapable of controlling what McMurphy is incontrollable of , such as his friends well being, to the order of Nurse Ratched and the Combine.
In the novel, Kesey suggests that a healthy expression of sexuality is a key component of sanity and that repression of sexuality leads directly to insanity. For example; by treating him like an infant and not allowing him to develop sexually, Billy Bibbet's mother causes him to lose his sanity. Missing from the halls of the mental hospital are healthy, natural expression of sexuality between two people. Perverted sexual expressions are said to take place in the ward; for example; Bromden describes the aides as "black boys in white suites committing sex acts in the hall" (p.9). The aides engage in illicit "sex acts" that nobody witnesses, and on several occasions it is suggested that they rape the patients, such as Taber. Nurse Ratched implicitly permits this to happen, symbolized by the jar of Vaseline she leaves the aides. This shows how she condones the sexual violation of the patients, because she gains control from their oppression. McMurphy's sanity is symbolized by his bold and open insertion of sexuality which gives him great confidence and individuality. This stands in contrast to what Kesey implies, ironically and tragically, represents the institution.
McMurphy’s battles with Nurse Ratched described his desire to provide the patients with knowledge that they should live in the world the way they want to. McMurphy was not only an anti-hero but, a rebel, warrior, seeker, or even the jester who had one goal which was to enlighten the patients to live in the moment with full enjoyment. By applying, the Hero’s Journey to the novel, it clearly explains the heroic qualities of McMurphy, who goes out to achieve great deeds for himself and the patients on the ward. Being able to change, the lives of many helps reveal how he has left hope and his legacy for many on the ward. As Joseph Campbell once stated, “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us,” reveals the importance that life cannot be planned ahead instead a person has to accept and create a life that they want as they move on. As you can see, McMurphy’s typical adventure as a hero proves that he was a hero of the ward that may not have lost Nurse Ratched’s control, but ended up in victory as he taught the patients on the ward how to be independent and manly enough to face the reality and society that is waiting for humans in the real