Who Is Weak In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The human mind is stronger than any computer or machine. However, the minds of some can become ill and weak, rendering them vulnerable to attacks. This is when the weaker minds are broken down by stronger minds who force the weak do their will. Ken Kesey suggests this war between weak and strong in his novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey describes how the weak minded can become almost like machines when broken down far enough, absorbing and executing every order from those who are stronger without question. However, Kesey also suggests what happens when a challenge to the strongest mind arises. He is adept in using metaphors, characterization, and imagery to reveal how the mental states of man can be transformed into complacent machine-like

entities. The struggle that the patients face results in the ultimate exploitation of the raw human mind and the consequences that come with it.
Kesey created Nurse Ratched, who is an ex-army nurse that reigns supreme over her ward in a mental institution, as the characterization of the mechanical system that surrounds life. She has her mental patients trapped in an inescapable cycle of robotic proportions. Chief Bromden calls this mechanical system “the Combine,” which controls even simple necessities of life like sleep, “I got away once holding one of those same red [knockout] capsules under my tongue, played like I’d swallowed it, and crushed it open later…for a tick of time, before it all turned into white dust, I saw it was a miniature electronic element…” (35). One of the ways Kesey personifies the mechanical domination Nurse Ratched has on the patients is through control over their mind as well as their body. Not even a basic human necessity like sleep goes on without her authorization. Kesey describes her control over the mind as a group meeting with all of the patients on the ward. Group meetings are held every day to discuss the problems of one patient, “the group can help the guy by showing him where he’s out of place; how society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you gotta measure up” (49). The group meetings should be a place of healing and gradual restoration back into normal society, but Nurse Ratched has the other patients attack the one patient and point out everything that is wrong with him, doing more harm than good. Kesey metaphorically symbolizes these meetings as chickens in a “pecking party” where, “The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go peckin’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds…but usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn” (57). It is in this manner that Nurse Ratched issues her control over the patients: she forces them to bury their own minds and bodies further into the mechanical state she has them in, then tears them down, one by one. Once this happens, Kesey uses a medicine-induced nightmare as a metaphor for the Combine taking full control of the patients. In the middle of the night, Chief sees an elderly patient being cut open and killed, “slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing…but there’s no blood or innards falling out…just a shower of rust and ashes and now and again a piece of wire or glass” (88). Kesey uses death as the final metaphor of Nurse Ratched and the Combine taking absolute control over the weaker minds. Patients are viewed as cogs and gears needed to power the machine they are placed into, but cogs and gears become old and worn down. They are then replaced with newer cogs and the Combine becomes even stronger. This is why Kesey introduces Randle McMurphy, to battle with Nurse Ratched and her system for the position of the strongest force on the ward.
Randle McMurphy was created by Kesey to characterize everything Nurse Ratched has been trying to suppress in the ward including gambling, alcohol, and sex. The nurse views him as a threat to the smooth operation of her ward, “the Big Nurse gets real put out if anything keeps her outfit from running smooth” (41). To the patients however, he represents inspiration and freedom from the robotic system they had been wired into. The personification of this system is represented through an unused control panel sitting in the tub room. McMurphy attempts to lift this control panel out of the floor, but only partially succeeds,
“His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift…we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it. Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls limp back against the wall” (125).
McMurphy is unable to overthrow the Combine by himself, but Kesey does not render him defeated or useless. Instead, Kesey depicts McMurphy as a leader who can guide the patients to a life where they aren’t regarded as machines to be controlled. Chief Bromden, who had been posing as a deaf and dumb patient for many years, had been heavily wired into the mechanical workings of the Combine ever since he was an adolescent. McMurphy broke those bindings and allowed him to speak his mind for the first time in years, “A man been still long as me probably had a considerable amount to talk about” (218). In return, Chief finished what McMurphy had started by ripping the control panel loose and finally breaking Nurse Ratched’s hold on the ward, “I heaved again and heard the wires and connections tearing out of the floor…I put my back toward the screen, then spun and let the momentum carry the panel through the screen and window with a ripping crash” (324). Kesey metaphorically depicts Chief’s ripping the panel free as a symbol of the patients being torn away from the machine they were wired into. The patients were finally free from the mechanical grasp the Combine and Nurse Ratched had held them in for so long. This freedom had come at an ugly price however, and Kesey had ensured McMurphy was the only one who could afford to pay it.
The other patients in the ward couldn’t disobey Nurse Ratched and her system because they were too far bound by it, but Kesey allows McMurphy to possess the ability to break away. Nurse Ratched’s grip began to loosen with McMurphy’s presence, so she decided to exploit his mind in the most permanent way possible. McMurphy was the only patient who openly defied the Combine and its attempts to include him into the machine the other patients were part of. This is why Kesey portrayed him as the one who had to expose and humiliate Nurse Ratched,
We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting…obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters…he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front. (318)
Kesey had already created the other patients to be too weak to defy Nurse Ratched, so it had to be McMurphy to humiliate her.

To the nurse, that was the final act of disobedience that sentenced him to pay for the others’ freedom. They had been living as machines under the Combine’s influence for too long, and McMurphy was the one they condemned. Kesey did this to characterize the condemnation of a martyr who needed to free the others. The Combine needed another gear to fill the empty spaces left behind by the freed patients, so Kesey personified McMurphy as the gear to fit those slots. Nurse Ratched had taken McMurphy away for several weeks and when he returned, he had been stripped of his spirit and the Combine had fit him into its mechanical devices, “The black boys wheeled in this gurney with a chart…that said in heavy black letters, ‘MCMURPHY, RANDLE P. POST-OPERATIVE.’ And below this was, ‘LOBOTOMY.’…the other end at the head…a swirl of red hair over a face milk white…” (321). Here Kesey uses imagery to depict McMurphy as a hollow shell of a man who finally lost the battle against the system. Nurse Ratched had triumphed over McMurphy, but he had already freed the patients from the absolute control of the Combine. Kesey also uses McMurphy’s submission as a metaphor which states that in order to become truly free of the mechanical workings of the Combine, someone else must make the ultimate sacrifice and fully succumb to it. However, McMurphy knew he had to make this

sacrifice so the other patients could break away from the automated, dull life they knew and lived.
Like the patients in the institution, one can allow their mind to become weak and at risk for control by other people.

This would result in a situation similar to the patients’ who were in the ward. These humans, who were controlled by Nurse Ratched for many years, became machines that never questioned her authority over them. Their ill minds and bodies were filled with gears and wires that oppressed their ability to look beyond life within the mental institution. When Randle McMurphy enters the ward, Nurse Ratched’s control began to waver, and the two did battle for the title of supreme mental authority. However, McMurphy’s mind was eventually stripped of its subconscious as payment for the others’ freedom. Kesey metaphorically depicts McMurphy as a flawed hero, the one who “flew over the cuckoo’s nest” in order for the other patients to tear away from the machine that held them captive. The Combine that bound them does not only exist within the mental ward, it exists everywhere. Chief recalls once in a cotton mill where he first noticed the mechanics of the system, “all the humming and clicking and rattling of people and machinery, jerking around in a pattern” (38). Even in today’s society is there a system wiring humans together in a single mechanism. This suggests that as long as modern-day society, such as the Combine, tries to control everyone like robotic slaves, there will always be someone who must suffer the consequences of freedom for everyone

else.