Insanity In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

In an archaic children’s rhyme, it is stated that “one flies east, one flies west, one flies over the cuckoo’s nest.” which deeply connects to the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by serving as an epigraph for the events in the novel. In the novel, the contrast between sanity and insanity is displayed via the inhabitants of an Oregon psychiatric hospital. It is narrated by Chief Bromden, a massive Indian who, despite his size, is unable to voice his opinions and is timid. At the commencing of the novel, the hospital is run by an overbearing and tyrannical leader known as Nurse Ratched. Ratched, also referred to as the “Big Nurse” receives her reputation from being completely organized and constantly attempting to achieve perfection that

This comes as both a blessing but cost to the patients, who have been tortured countess times through processes such as electroshock therapy in order to be perfectly cooperative as the Big Nurse wishes. Throughout the novel, Chief Bromden analyzes the actions of McMurphy, who acts as sane as the “normal” people in society and how he plans to overthrow the “dictator” of the mental hospital through an objective opinion due to the fact he must not speak to maintain his reputation as both deaf and unintelligent. Over the course of six months, however, McMurphy had become successful in his quest, which did come at a cost. Without the rule of the Nurse, who, at the time, was planning her revenge, all functions of the hospital had ceased to continue, leading the men who had once wished to seek freedom with a blindside. As the novel progresses, many more of the members of the hospital seem to be out of character, as with Bromden who begins to speak. When the Big Nurse allows the men to travel out of the hospital on a boating trip, the men realize that the lack of being accustomed to society was the reason they had been “imprisoned” within a hospital and that their freedoms came at a