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Joanna Martinez AP English Literature July 23, 2015 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest When it comes to manipulation many view it as a negative aspect in life. Although people view it as a negative aspect, they continue to manipulate words and actions to get what they want. Ken Kesey applied manipulation in the book to reveal the positive and negative sides of manipulation. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a controversial novel that describes the inner workings of a mental institution. A very strict nurse named Nurse Ratched runs the mental institution. Nurse Ratched is the antagonist that uses manipulation on the patients. One of Ratched’s methods is the group therapy session. While in the session, McMurphy asks, “Is this the usual pro-cedure …show more content…
for these Group Therapy shindigs? Bunch of chickens at a peckin’ party?” (Kensy. 57) McMurphy begins to realize the way the Nurse Ratched manipulates the men. Throughout the week, patients are able to write other patients and then the nurse will bring it up in the session. Making patients look bad by asking for their input. This manipulation is suppose to help treat the mental disorders of the patients.
But in the reality of the book, this manipulation makes the patients feel down. The only upside of this manipulation is that it keeps them in line. It keeps them in line because this does not help any of the patients progress and it stops them from thinking like any normal person does. This is her method for mistreating and emasculating them. By doing this, she has full control over their manhood. Randall Patrick McMurphy is the protagonist of this novel. He is also a manipulator but unlike Ratched, McMurphy has good intentions. He decides to step up and help the patients because he sees no one is going anywhere. His method to helping the patients was to change everyone’s opinion and help them realize Ratched’s strictness and useless methods. He does this by explaining the pecking party, “And you want to know somethin’ else, buddy? You want to know who pecks that first peck? ..Harding waits for him to go on.. It’s that old nurse. that’s who.” (Kensey,58) At first, McMurphy begins curing them by showing them that, the methods Ratched is showing them are not helping and starts showing them the right direction. He shows everyone things that don’t normally see and this helps the patients move to a healthy state of
mind.
From the moment McMurphy enters the ward it is clear to all that he is different and hard to control. He’s seen as a figure the rest of the patients can look up to and he raises their hopes in taking back power from the big nurse. The other patients identify McMurphy as a leader when he first stands up to the nurse at her group therapy, saying that she has manipulated them all to become “a bunch of chickens at a pecking party”(Kesey 55). He tells the patients that they do not have to listen to Nurse Ratched and he confronts her tactics and motives. The patients see him as a leader at this point, but McMurphy does not see the need for him to be leading alone. McMurphy is a strong willed and opinionated man, so when he arrives at the ward he fails to comprehend why the men live in fear, until Harding explains it to him by
Nurse Ratched is portrayed as the authority figure in the hospital. The patients see no choice but to follow her regulations that she had laid down for them. Nurse Ratched's appearance is strong and cold. She has womanly features, but hides them “Her Face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive… A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing putting those big, womanly breasts on what would have otherwise been a prefect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.” (11) She kept control over the ward without weakness, until McMurphy came. When McMurphy is introduced into the novel he is laughing a lot, and talking with the patients in the ward, he does not seem intimidated by Miss Ratched. McMurphy constantly challenges the control of Nurse Ratched, while she tries to show she remains in control, He succeeds in some ways and lo...
Initially the ward is run as if it was a prison ward, but from the moment the brawling, gambling McMurphy sets foot on the ward it is identified that he is going to cause havoc and provide change for the patients. McMurphy becomes a leader, a Christ like figure and the other patients are his disciples. The person who is objective to listen to his teachings at first is Chief Bromden (often called Bromden), but then he realizes that he is there to save them and joins McMurphy and the Acutes (meaning that they have possibility for rehabilitation and release) in the protest against Nurse Ratched, a bureaucratic woman who is the protagonist of the story, and the `Combine' (or society).
If the patients saw that Ms. Ratched could get angry, and that she was hiding her personality, they would realize that they are not rabbits after all, and that she is not a “good strong wolf”, as they previously believed. When patient R.P McMurphy, the hospital patient that tries to remove all of Ms. Ratched’s power, arrives on the hospital ward, he makes no effort to hide his personality, and the patients begin to recognize how Ms. Ratched hides her personality, in the novel, Chief Bromden says, “He stands looking at us, back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. In the novel, Ms. Ratched just removed the tub room, which was used as a game room, from the patients, this angered McMurphy, so he decided to do something subtle to get revenge on Ms. Ratched. In the novel, it says, “The Big Nurse’s eyes swelled out as he got close. . .
The dominant discourse of conformity is characterised predominantly by influencing to obey rules described by Kesey’ novel ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. At the start of the novel, all the acute and the silence chronic conform to Nurse Ratched’s rules before the arrival of McMurphy. Since, she was in complete control over the ward until McMurphy arrived. After he arrived, he begins to take control of the patients. He begins to take the role of leader, a leader that was unexpected. Kesey has foregrounded the character, McMurphy to be different thus creating a binary opposite that is represented in the novel. Kesey shows the binary opposites as being good versus evil. The former represents the con man McMurphy, and the latter represents the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. An example of this would be, “She’s carrying her wicker bag…a bag shape of a tool box with a hemp handle…” (pg.4), showing that Nurse Ratched is a mechanic. McMurphy is portrayed as being a good character by revitalising the hope of the patients by strangling Nurse Ratched. This revitalise the hope for the pa...
McMurphy is symbolized as the typical individual, while Big Nurse Ratched is symbolized as a member of the system, or the Combine. Bromden narrates, "McMurphy doesn't know it, but he's onto what I realized a long time back, that it's not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it's the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that's the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them" (181).
Nurse Ratched is the most daunting persona of the novel, due in large part to the use of her voice. Throughout the novel, both McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are continually trying to pull each other down. Nurse Ratched, using her dominant speaking skills, tries to prove to the patients that McMurphy is conning them with his vocalizations, “Look at some of these gifts, as devoted fans of his might call them. First, there was the gift of the tub. Was that actually his to give?
...s a time where the people were not afraid to uproar against controlling institutions. During this time period, a common hatred against conformity was shared throughout the public- these people were later to be known as beatniks ("Beatniks and Hippies"). Kesey himself being considered one of these “hippies” tries to portray his radical views through the character McMurphy. He represents the leader of the psychiatric ward, and has the ability to actually see the corruption occurring in the institution. He seeks to rally up the other patients through rebellious acts in order to break free of their oppression of Nurse Ratched (Kesey). Kesey is able to incorporate the anti-conformists ideology through McMurphys’ rebellious nature in the mental ward, and therefore is able to truly capture the anti-materialistic and anti-government tone of the time period of the 1960’s.
The power of manipulation is a very powerful tool and can easily be misused to benefit
While McMurphy tries to bring about equality between the patients and head nurse, she holds onto her self-proclaimed right to exact power over her charges because of her money, education, and, ultimately, sanity. The patients represent the working-class by providing Ratched, the manufacturer, with the “products” from which she profits—their deranged minds. The patients can even be viewed as products themselves after shock therapy treatments and lobotomies leave them without personality. The negative effects of the hospital’s organizational structure are numerous. The men feel worthless, abused, and manipulated, much like the proletariat who endured horrendous working conditions and rarely saw the fruits of their labor during the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom and United States in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (“Industrial Revolution” 630).
The ward much like Nurse Ratched looked perfect on the outside, like the quintessential psychiatric ward, but when looked at deeper many problems would arise. The Nurse used fear and an iron fist to run her ward more like a prison rather than a mental help facility. If any of the patients stepped out of line she would literally shock them back into their place. Nurse Ratched and McMurphy both had one major thing in common, they always needed to be in charge. They would have many conflicts throughout the book, everything from breaking glass to arguing about taking advantage of the other
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.
McMurphy does so by exposing the hidden truth kept away by Nurse Ratched and reminding patients to stand up and rebel against the cruelty she imposes on them. First of all, McMurphy comes to the rescue when Nurse Ratched, whose main purpose is to help patients feel safe and reach their full potential; regardless she openly exploits patients to the point of humiliation making them feel unwelcome, and terrified from sharing their own opinions. For instance, when mental patients Dale Harding expresses his feelings of insecurity with his spouse, McMurphy reminds him that if “The flock geta sight of a speck of blood on some chicken they all go to peckin it…Till there is nothing left but blood and bones and feathers.”(24) Despite the fact that McMurphy is still an outsider at this point in the plot and his no relations or friendship with Harding, yet he still decides to advise Harding to stand up for himself or else it might come back to hurt him in the coming future. Secondly, when Nurse Ratched victimizes her patients out of their privileges, McMurphy is quick to help the patients realize they need to stand up to the Nurse in order to not get deceived. For example, when Billy solemnly agrees to Nurse Ratched’s orders, however McMurphy tells Billy to “Don’t move” and just “sit down”
Immediately, he understands that the only way to achieve a leadership role within the ward is through each patient’s vulnerability. McMurphy accomplishes this criticising of others during the weekly therapeutic meetings. By explaining to the patients that “[Nurse Ratched] ain’t peckin’ at [their] eyes” but “at [their] balls, buddy, at [their] everlovin’ balls”, McMurphy forces them to realize that Nurse Ratched has suppressed their masculinity, but at the same time, he uses a similar approach to acquire dominance within the group (59). McMurphy gains the patients’ trust by making them feel as though they need him to gain freedom, when in reality, he is selfish and positioning himself to get the control he desires within the ward. Furthermore, McMurphy takes advantage of Chief, through his silence, in order to make easy money off the other patients. Not only did McMurphy make Chief “[feel] like [he’d] helped him cheat them out of their money”, but deep down Chief knew that they all feel that “something had been kicked out from under them” due to McMurphy’s constant gambling (269). While the patients do not want to admit it, they know McMurphy is scamming them, but they do not have the strength to rebel against