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

Manipulation is a common method of control and influence that most if not all people have employed in one way or another in the course of their life. Any person can fall victim to manipulation, whether they are an authority figure like a parent or employer, an equal like a friend or classmate, or a ward like a child or student. Often when people envision manipulation, they only see the malicious nature it often has towards the victim. However, the perpetrator can sometimes have good intentions that leads to positive effects on the person being influenced. Both intentions are seen in Ken Kesey’s satiric novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with the characters Randle Patrick McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. These characters both possess powerful

personalities and manipulative tendencies that often come into conflict with each other and affect others around them. Throughout the novel, McMurphy and Nurse Ratched manipulate various people within the asylum, with the former doing so with more positive intentions and the latter doing so with more malevolent ones.
Toc begin, McMurphy is a con man who purportedly got himself committed as a psychopath and sexual deviant to avoid farm work. And, as the narrator of the story describes, it seems that he has a positive impact on all the inmates in the asylum from the very moment he walks into the story. This leads to the first person McMurphy improves with his strong, aggressive personality, Chief Bromden. Chief Bromden, better known as Chief, is the longest resident of the asylum and is the narrator throughout the story. He is believed to be schizophrenic or have a form of PTSD that causes him hallucinate. He pretends to be a deaf-mute throughout his stay in the asylum with no one seeming to question it or even watch him close enough to see the obvious falsehood. Chief later traces the first instance he was not heard back to when he was ten and people assumed he was too stupid to understand what they were saying (Kesey 181). This moment in his past seems to have had a profound impact on Chief’s life, contributing to his introverted, spiritless, and craven personality. Then one day, McMurphy saunters in and stands before Chief. He introduces himself, attempting to speak to him and offering him his hand (Kesey 27). This gesture is probably the most genuine human interaction Chief has had since he came to the asylum. It probably meant more to him than anybody could comprehend. Then McMurphy is the first person in the asylum to find out that Chief is pretending to be deaf-mute when he warns him that one of the orderlies are and watches him “give a jump when I told you that c*** was coming” (Kesey 77). This shows that McMurphy is the only person in the asylum to pay Chief enough mind to notice that he is not deaf. Afterwards, he chooses to keep Chief’s hearing a secret. Later on in the story, McMurphy is able to coax Chief into laughing and thanking him when he sings a song to him and offers him gum (Kesey 184-185). Chief reveals that this is the first time in years that he “let anyone hear me do any more than grunt or bellow” (Kesey 184). To cajole him to continue talking, McMurphy relays a story of his own that describes he himself was ignored and talked around like he was not there (Kesey 185). They continue to have the first conversation Chief has taken part in in years, which consisted of Chief warning that the Combine, which is the asylum and its workers, views McMurphy as “big” and “Now they got to bust you” (Kesey 187).
During their conversation, McMurphy promises to make Chief “big” again and in exchange for Chief promising to be able to lift the panel in the tub room and for coming free to the fishing trip he arranged (Kesey 189). Later when Chief is “big,” McMurphy gets him to lift a 400 pound panel in the tub room (Kesey 225). He superficially seems to do this in order to hustle Scanlon and Harding into betting against the possibility of it being possible to win their money, which he does share with Chief. But this later proves to be important later to Chief’s escape. Another time when McMurphy manipulates Chief is during the vote for changing the television channel to baseball in the afternoon, when he puts all the pressure and all his hope on Chief to vote in his favor, which he does, making this his first real act of rebellion against the Combine (Kesey 125-126). When McMurphy convinces Chief to go to a fishing trip with him and the other patients, he is both benefiting himself because he was short on people and Chief by showing him that there is a world outside the Combine, allowing him to get a true taste of freedom (Kesey 189). In the end, all the efforts coaxing and manipulating Chief into doing various things makes him grow as a person. After going through electroshock, Chief has the power he did not have before to fight through the fog; he also begins to talk and socialize with the other patients (Kesey 243). Then when Chief kills McMurphy’s body after his lobotomy, he lifts that same panel in the tub room and smashes a window (like McMurphy kept doing) and escapes the Combine to freedom in Canada (Kesey 270-272). In all, McMurphy’s strong personality and manipulation helped Chief grow as a person and become free once again.
The second person McMurphy affects with his strong and aggressive personality is Dr. Spivey. Dr. Spivey is a quiet, powerless, introverted man that is probably addicted to Demerol, a synthetic opiate that can be as addictive as heroin. Nurse Ratched constant insinuations that he is an addict makes him yield to her will and allow her to do as she wishes in the Combine (Kesey 60). He is profoundly impacted by McMurphy’s presence in the hospital. When the doctor views McMurphy’s rebellious nature and aggressive behavior, he begins to follow suit and even support him on several schemes. On one such occasion, McMurphy goes to his office and coerces Spivey into proposing to have a carnival in the ward and to open a second day/game room, all without Nurse Ratched’s prior approval (Kesey 97-99). Without McMurphy’s influence and dogged support, the doctor would have never had the backbone to do such a thing. Later on, the doctor supports incessant McMurphy’s request to take a vote on changing the television channel to watch championship baseball for an afternoon, in clear opposition to what the nurse wishes (Kesey 123-124). Then, on the day of the fishing trip, McMurphy learns that he would need another driver to sign a Responsibility slip to take another car out or leave half the men who signed up at the asylum. His solution to manipulate the doctor with the help of Candy, the other driver, to drive the other car (Kesey 198). This decision again goes against Nurse Ratched. While on that same fishing trip, the doctor is able to reel in a large fish on the line, despite Sefelt’s doubts, which helps to symbolize his growing determination as well as his own rebellion against Nurse Ratched (Kesey 212-213). He becomes more and more empathetic with the patients and tries to make life in the asylum more bearable than it had been before, making him take control of his position as the doctor of the ward. His final scene in the novel is when he was “informed that his resignation would be accepted” (Kesey 268). However, instead of just complying, he retorts that “they would have to go the whole way and can him if they wanted him out” (268). In all, McMurphy’s bull-headedness and influence over Dr. Spivey helps him to develop confidence and courage, and also helps him become more social and sympathetic with the patients.
In contrast to McMurphy, Nurse Ratched (also known as the Big Nurse) has an overall negative impact due to her strong and manipulative personality. Nurse Ratched is a nurse that seems to have an overarching supreme authority within the asylum. One person her overbearing and manipulative personality seems to destroy is William “Billy” Bibbit. Billy is a very shy people-pleaser who has a propensity to stutter and has a strong and overly-dependent relationship with his mother. This is the root of his problem: Nurse Ratched and his mother are friends, making it possible for her to wield a level of great power over him (Kesey 168). He desires to be his own man, but the opposing force of the Nurse puts him in a rather helpless situation: that is, until the arrival of R. P. McMurphy. McMurphy encourages Billy to become his own person. On the fishing trip, McMurphy introduces Billy to Candy and they seem to develop a romantic connection, which McMurphy tries to help foster (Kesey 211). Billy seems to develop a kind of confidence during that trip, which is what allows him to go along with McMurphy’s asylum party plan so he can see Candy again (Kesey 248-250). The next morning when Nurse Ratched discovers Billy and Candy in bed together, she attempts to shame him, but that falls on deaf ears. Then she tells him she wonders “how your poor mother is going to take this.” This single statement wretches Billy back into the reality of his situation, he seems to have a nervous breakdown and reverts to his stuttering cravenness. He begins to turn on McMurphy and the others in order to keep her from telling his mother (Kesey 264-265). He is then taken to the doctor’s office and the ultimate consequence is that he slits his throat with a medical instrument (Kesey 266). Nurse Ratched’s power over and manipulation of Billy into confessing results in the destruction of Billy both emotionally and physically. In conclusion, Nurse Ratched’s aggressive and manipulative methods arrests and regresses any character development Billy makes and kills him.
Another character that Nurse Ratched’s domineering and powerful personality affects negatively is Randle P. McMurphy. As described earlier on, McMurphy is sent to the asylum by a judge who ruled him to be a psychopath, sexual deviant, and in possession of violent tendencies, but he supposedly got himself committed so he does not have to do farm work (Kesey 44). He believes that life in the asylum will be easy, he even jokingly says that he was “getting my first glass of orange juice in six months…Look at me now: bacon, toast, butter, eggs¾coffee the little honey in the kitchen even asks me if I like it black or white” (Kesey 92-93). He soon found he was sorely wrong. Both McMurphy and Nurse Ratched have powerful and aggressive personalities, so they were bound to come into conflict sooner rather than later. This initially begins when he learns how the Big Nurse represses and emasculates the men in the asylum and that most of them are not very insane in at all. At first his rebellious behavior takes her off guard because nobody has yet to go against her authority (Kesey 87). But her response is to passive-aggressiveness: she undermines any efforts he makes to improve life in the asylum and tries her very hardest to turn the other patients against him, like when, she insinuates that he is cheating his fellow inmates out of money (Kesey 198). Any progress he makes, she tries to regress, such as when he wins the vote to change the channel one afternoon and she “flips a switch and the TV picture swirls back into the gray…[however,] he don’t even let on he knows the picture is turned off” (Kesey 127). Because of this rebellion, staff members of the asylum begin to come up with reasons to send him to the Disturbed Ward, considering diagnoses like “Schizophrenic reaction…Latent Homosexual with Reaction Formation…[and] Negative Oedipal” (Kesey 135). However, she decides not to do this for fear of making him a martyr; she wants to break him and make him submit to her rules because he is not an “extraordinary being¾some kind of ‘super’ psychopath” (Kesey 136).
But Murphy continues to rebel even when he knows that she can have him permanently committed.

He attempts to create excitement within the asylum by organizing a party where he invites two strippers Sandy and Candy (Kesey 247). However, all the positive feelings from that night go up in smoke when she shames Billy into confessing who the mastermind of the party was by using her relationship with his mother (Kesey 264). This causes Billy to kill himself by slitting his throat, and she uses this tragedy to abase McMurphy, saying “the poor miserable, misunderstood boy killed himself…First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives¾gambling with human lives¾ as if you thought yourself to be a God” (Kesey 266). These words seem to destroy McMurphy, a man who is only trying to make the lives of the inmates more exciting and worth living. He would have blamed himself for Billy’s death and probably Cheswick’s as well before she said it, but her saying it makes him have to confront the reality that if he had never come, they both probably would have still been alive. McMurphy snaps for the final time; he “smashed through the glass door…grabbed for her and ripped her uniform…He gave a cry…A sound of cornered-animal fear and hat and surrender and defiance” (Kesey 267). Soon after he is taken up to the Disturbed Ward where he is lobotomized and made a vegetable. Finally, to set McMurphy free forevermore, Chief suffocates him (Kesey 270). In summation, the manipulation and aggressive personality and tactics of Nurse Ratched causes McMurphy, a relatively normal spirited, yet stubborn man, to go into a violent rage and to truly become

crazy.
The characters McMurphy and Nurse Ratched from Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest both possess authoritative and aggressive personalities that heavily impact those around them. Aggressive and manipulative personalities are often seen as negative traits because of people with these traits tend to use them in a negative way. Despite this, both characters become emergent leaders in their respective groups, showing that these personality traits do have the potential to make an influential and inspiring leader. However, the way they impact those around them is what puts one in a more positive and heroic light on one and casts a sinister shadow on the other. In the end, intent and outcome are what determine whether a person or act is good or bad.