Theme Of Insanity In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

1653 Words4 Pages

To navigate your way through life trying to identify what makes you insane or not will simply drive you into insanity. But, what measures the level to which you are considered sane? Throughout the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, this very question is explored and challenged consistently. Through the characters and their experiences within a psych ward in the 1960s, Kesey presents us with one simple question: how do you define insanity?
The novel is narrated by Chief Bromden, who had pretended to be a deaf and dumb man for majority of his life. One re-occurring concept throughout the novel, that is presented by Chief, is the Combine. The Combine is the name given to the entirety of society and how it automatically declines …show more content…

Majority of the patients in the ward have been underestimated and undermined their entire lives, giving them absolutely no willpower to ever push boundaries of what they can accomplish. When you have someone like Nurse Ratched constantly watching you and judging you, it takes away a lot of self esteem, if any of them had in the first place. McMurphy pushed these patients to finally pave their own path rather than travelling one that was already made for them. But, in many ways McMurphy tried to use the idea of insanity to his and the other patients’ …show more content…

She will never gain the cooperation of the patients again (Bom, 14). In her pursuit to silence the patients, she only gave them more of a voice. Chief Bromden has spent his entire life in the shadows of his ethnicity and his accused insanity. Through Bromden’s narration and point of view in the novel, “His character causes us to doubt the validity of claims that declare men to be mad for their experience of the system, and presents madness as the possible result of our own society.” (Bom, 10). With the powerful ending of Chief putting McMurphy out of his misery and finally running away was very symbolic. Yes, through the novel McMurphy was always a scheming man, but him showing Chief the control panel and his ability to pick it up was not only foreshadowing but also heavily

Open Document