Cuckoo's Nest Conformity

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During the Stanford Prison Experiment, a group of men volunteered to be prisoners in a school-run experiment, and conformed to a submissive lifestyle that led to horrific torture and violent abuse. This theme of conformity and its negative impacts is explored heavily in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the book, a group of mentally handicapped men are dominated by an emotionless, cold-hearted nurse in a psychiatric facility until a new inmate arrives. This inmate refuses to follow submissive nature of the other men and shifts the power dynamic of the hospital. Through the characters of Nurse Ratched (the big nurse) and Randle McMurphy (the new inmate), Ken Kesey explores this theme of how power belongs to the unique, and occasionally the immoral. The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest demonstrates that people who conform are powerless, and the non-conformists are the powerful. …show more content…

He sees that the men have accepted their submissiveness under the cold hand of Nurse Ratched and none of them are doing anything to protest. They lead simplistic, dark lives and have to deal with torture, shock therapy, and cruel psychological punishments on a daily basis. The power dynamic in the hospital- at least before McMurphy changes it- is established in a key scene between McMurphy and a few other patients with the use of rhetorical devices. After a tense interrogation where Nurse Ratched’s characteristics are introduced, the smartest inmate in the crowd, a man named Harding, uses elevated diction to inform

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