OFOTCN

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Lina Tran pd.2
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey begins with a short introduction by the narrator, Chief Bromden. Chief Bromden is a half Indian Chronic at the ward. Chronics are patients that have been in the ward for so long that people assume that they will never check out. During the time that Bromden was there, he acted as a dumb deaf mute without being caught by anyone. Though his condition does not seem as bad as some of the other Chronics—some were vegetables—it was evident that Bromden had problems with hallucinations and delusions from the final line of the first chapter, “But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”
After the introduction by the Chief, the story proceeds to a normal morning at the ward. The patients are sitting in the Day Room after their morning pills. Then a new patient, Randall McMurphy, checks in. McMurphy was a big redheaded man who loved to gamble and got transferred to the ward from a work farm. From the beginning, McMurphy had been hard to control. He refused any of the traditional check in routines that any new patient needed to follow including taking his admission shower. The Black Boys, the orderlies of the ward, went to get Nurse Ratched in attempt to put McMurphy in line.
Nurse Ratched was head nurse of the ward. She needed to have control over everything. All of the patients feared Nurse Ratched, or as they sometimes call her, “Big Nurse.” That is everyone feared her until McMurphy. Because he refused to listen to Nurse Ratched, the “ruler” of the ward, it showed that there will be dismay between the two throughout the story.
McMurphy continued to diminish Nurse Ratched’s sense of authority when got Dr. Spivey to bring up the idea of...

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...onducted prison and asylum reform. I never actually thought about the fact that the conditions for treatment were still relatively bad. I had the same thoughts as most people would have had about mental health patients in the 1950s-1980s. I felt that I would not want to be associated with people with mental illnesses before I read this book. After reading it and understanding that many mental patients could still act like normal people, it made me realize that I was judging a group of people without really knowing what any of them were really like—which was something that I should have never done. Also, this book made me grateful that I do not have a mental disorder. It made me realize that people with mental health problems live a hard life coping with their disorder and that I should be thankful for all that I have instead of complaining about the little things.