One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Theme

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In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey there are multiple themes portrayed throughout the story. Some of the themes such as emasculation and societal pressures are introduced at the very beginning of the story and are then slowly made more insignificant by other themes. A few of the themes are introduced when the protagonist, Randle McMurphy is arrives early in the story and starts to mess up Nurse Ratched’s outfit. The themes that come with McMurphy include the necessity for the expression of sexuality and the power of laughter. Throughout the story Nurse Ratched uses emasculation and societal pressures to control the patients until McMurphy shows them how to express their sexuality and use the power of laughter to regain their dominance.
It is clear from the very beginning of the story that Nurse Ratched is a powerful woman as she is given the nickname of the Big Nurse. Her power comes from the way she runs the mental hospital and the staff she has working for her, all attempting to emasculate the patients. It is implied that as patients first come into the hospital they are taken into a room with Vaseline and a thermometer, subjugated and then raped by the Nurse Ratched’s assistants. “I see two maybe all three of them in there, in that shower room with the Admission, running that thermometer around in the grease till it’s coated the size of your finger…and then shut the door and turn all the showers up to where you can’t hear anything.” (Kesey, 10) McMurphy avoids the thermometer telling the assistant to wait until he has introduced himself to everyone on the ward which allows him to escape this procedure.
Nurse Ratched also emasculates the patients by making them more feminine or taking away their ability to express...

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...ted from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anyone had ever imagined.” (Kesey, 319) The very end of that quote is the most important part because it shows just how feminine Nurse Ratched was and how much she hid it. Yet McMurphy still showed it to the world and conquered what everyone thought was an impregnable force.
Throughout the book many things had changed but perhaps the most noticeable was the themes. The corrupt themes present at the start of the book slowly became less and prominent over time. At the end they were no longer there and the themes arising at the beginning had fully developed and flourished. Although Nurse Ratched attempted to control the patients with the themes of conformity and emasculation McMurphy became a savior figure and helped to rescue them from her matriarchy using the themes of expressed sexuality and laughter’s power.

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