Absurdity In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Essay

The Importance of Absurdity
Our capacity to differentiate right from wrong in this world makes up a large part of who we are. Whenever we criticize the aspects of our lives, we assert ourselves, our ideas, and everything we have experienced and endured. Our ability to hold the world up to our standards lends us a feeling of power and control over our lives, giving us our pride and credibility as individuals, but when it is taken away from us, it renders us feeble, fearful, and helpless to whatever reality throws at us, causing us to gradually lose our sense of self, as well as our grasp on reality. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, we are shown through the eyes of Bromden, a patient at an asylum, to what extremes our sense of absurdity can affect us, having the power to drive us into submissiveness when we lose our control over it, while also giving us a feeling of power and …show more content…
This is a scenario where a nurse is able to discredit the patients’ ability to judge the world, to her advantage. By stripping away the patients’ ability to point out the absurd, through the use of shame, she is able to render them unable to revolt against her, forcing the patients to blatantly accept her methods as beneficial without any need for them to comprehend why. The asylum present in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is flawed, showing the dangers that can come with allowing a single person assume standards that were made for so many, causing those unable to adapt to the Big Nurse’s exact standards to fall more closer to insanity then they may ever have before. But with this problem, Kesey also presents to us a cure. There is one patient who remains an exception to all the patients that have been described so far, and that patient is is