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Themes of one flying over the cuckoo's nest
One flew over the cuckoos nest movie themes
One flew over the cuckoos nest movie themes
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Randle McMurphy is the main protagonist in the movie. McMurphy severed a short sentence on a prison farm for battery and statutory rape. He is moved to a mental institution but he is not really mentally ill because he hopes to avoid hard labor. The ward is run by the strict nurse named Nurse Ratched. Nurse Ratched is the type of character that subdues the actions of her patients through an orderly passive-aggressive way and she is intimidating towards her patients. During McMurphy’s journey in the ward he comes across some patients which are Billy Bibbit, Cheswick, Martini, Harding, Taber, Sefelt, and the “Chief”. Each character is diagnose with an illness such as tantrums, stuttering speech problems, epileptic, delusional, or even deaf. Nurse Ratched studies McMurphy’s actions towards the ward patients and he starts to become rebellious. McMurphy teaches the patients how to gamble and ends up taking all their cigarettes but throughout their time together in the ward McMurphy becomes friends with the patients. He also teaches his friends to gain more self-confident throughout the movie …show more content…
He also learns that Chief is perfectly fine and has no illness. McMurphy’s plan is to sneak two women, Candy and Rose, into the ward and bribe the night guard. Instead of quickly escaping, he decides to throw a small party but it actually turns into a horrific party. It soons turns into daytime and McMurphy nor the Chief has not escaped the ward but instead caused a mess. Nurse Ratched has arrived and finds the whole ward out of place. She is furious and demands an explanation from everyone; the only one able to give an explanation is Billy but he ends up confessing that it was McMurphy’s idea. She sends Billy to the doctor’s office but discovers that he committed suicide. McMurphy sees his friend Billy dead and quickly becomes anger at Nurse Ratched so he decided to strangle
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.
Randle McMurphy is in a constant battle within himself, he is portrayed as a sociopath. He does not base his actions off of whether they will affect those around him, instead does as he pleases. His actions are based off of what is best for himself. McMurphy was first introduced as a savior to the ward, He soon uses the patients for his own benefit, the patients look up to him as one of their new proclaimed leader. McMurphy inspires hope into them and make them want to stand up for themselves. This give
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
The novel is narrated by the main character, Chief Bromden, who reveals the two faces of Nurse Ratched, in the opening pages of the novel. He continues sweeping the floor while the nurse assaults three black aides for gossiping in the hallway. Chief chooses to describe the nurse abstractly: “her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and bigger...by the time the patients get there...all they see is the head nurse, smiling and calm and cold as usual” (5). Nurse Ratched runs the psychiatric ward with precision and harsh discipline. When Randle McMurphy arrives to escape time in jail, he immediately sizes the Big Nurse up as manipulative, controlling, and power-hungry. The portrayal that he expresses to the patient's leaves a lasting impact on them: “The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and all go to peckin’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers” (57). McMurphy finds it appalling that the patients are too blindsided to see Nurse Ratched’s conniving scheme, which is to take charge of the patients’ lives. The only person who understands Nurse Ratched’s game is McMurphy, and this motivates him to rebel against the
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).
This also demonstrates how much power McMurphy has gained so far over Ms. Ratched. In the novel, Ms. Ratched tries to take away all of the power that McMurphy has gained over her by blaming McMurphy for making the lives of the hospital patients worse, and that McMurphy was the cause for the deaths of patients William Bibbit and Charles Cheswick. This angers McMurphy, and causes him to choke her with the intent to kill her, in the novel, Chief Bromden describes, “Only at the last---after he’d smashed through that glass door, her face swung around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front.
In the end, they believe they have control over the other, but they do not realize that they both have lost control until it is too late. They both pay a harsh penalty for their struggle to gain control over the ward. Nurse Ratched forever loses her precious power status and authority over the institution, while McMurphy loses the friends he tired to help, his personality, and eventually his life. Throughout the novel, these two characters relentlessly fight to control each other. They both realize that control can never be absolute.
Unable to see McMurphy imprisoned in a body that will go on living (under Nurse Ratched’s control) even though his spirit is gone, Chief smothers him to death that night. Then he escapes the hospital and leaves for Canada and a new life. We begin to see the different situations in which the patients struggle to overcome. Whether insane or not, the hospital is undeniably in control of the fates of its
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) The character McMurphy as played by Jack Nicholson, McMurphy’s is a criminal who is troubled and keeps being defiant. Instead of pleading guilty, McMurphy pleads insanity and then lands inside a mental hospital. Murphy reasons that being imprisoned within the hospital will be just as bad as being locked up in prison until he starts enjoying being within by messing around with other staff and patients. In the staff, McMurphy continuously irritates Nurse Ratched. You can see how it builds up to a control problem between the inmates and staff. Nurse Ratched is seen as the “institution” and it is McMurphy’s whole goal to rebel against that institution that she makes herself out to be.The other inmates view McMurphy like he is god. He gives the inmates reason to
Throughout the novel he is very loud and is known for his unwavering ability to speak his mind and confront those that oppose him. Nurse Ratched uses her voice throughout the novel to intimidate the patients. She is the antagonist of the novel. The patients obsequiously follow Ratched’s command, until McMurphy comes along. They all fear that she will send them to shock therapy if they don’t obey her.
At the ward, McMurphy disagrees with Nurse Ratched’s rules. He sees that the patients do not fight back and listen to whatever Nurse Ratched tells them to do. He also does not like how Nurse Ratched has so much power. Against the normality, McMurphy tries to diminish Nurse Ratched and the Combine’s power. Throughout the story, the patients start listening to what McMurphy says and not Nurse Ratched. They also start doing things they would not normally do at the ward. They are finally breaking into Nurse Ratched’s power, through the main character McMurphy. McMurphy can be seen as a Christ figure based on the events in the ward. It can be seen when he is killed by the Combine, the fishing trip, and through his leadership to the
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.
Finding his sentence somewhat hard, being condemned to work in the Pendleton Farm for Correction, McMurphy plays smart and pretends to be mad, seeking escape from prison and leading a good and easy life in a psychiatric hospital while waiting for freedom. However, his attitudes don’t show any problems with his mental health, which instigates several discussions between him, Nurse Ratched, and the doctors at the clinic. McMurphy is a captivating character. He is a player, a born rebel, a lover of life's pleasures, and as he says, he is accustomed to “being top man” (19). McMurphy’s stormy ways of being completely changes the hospital’s climate, entering a fierce and never-ending fight with the head nurse Ratched. From the moment he arrives he goes against any employee system, which makes him a hero and a leader for the other patients, who could not challenge the rules of the institution. “I thought I might take advantage of this and maybe make both our lives a little more richer” (71), McMurphy tells the patients. What makes him such a special character is that he never treats the people as patients, as someone different from all that surrounded them, he treats them like “normal” people, shaking their hand, encouraging them to question the life they lead, and enjoy simple pleasures. “He has the superhero’s efficacious physical power but, like
Her presence and control over the ward can be shown by the way she makes her first appearance; ‘with a gust of cold’ (7). However, underneath the Big Nurse’s mechanical nature and her stiff uniform, she does possess a human feature in her breasts. By introducing McMurphy, a redhead gambler who fakes his diagnosis as a psychopath, the entire system of the ward have been disturbed. McMurphy’s character contrasts with that of Nurse Ratched as he symbolises freedom and self-determination. Even though Nurse Ratched has suspicions that McMurphy is not actually “insane”, she treats him as insane in order to maintain authority and control over him. This very act can be considered insane as the ward who is meant to help cure the patients, is trying to exercise control over a sane man by the mere belief of Nurse Ratched that he is insane. In addition, Kesey’s depiction of the character prompts the reader to question the line between normal and insane. There is no doubt that the