Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is a well known piece of literature published in 1962 containing the theme of how society has the power to decide whether a person is really insane or not because of the way an individual exhibits themselves. Power and control are a motif reoccurring in the story which is different than the definition applied in the outside world than on the ward in which power is usually defined as the authority given to someone holding a higher position. Through the lenses of the narrator known as Chief Bromden whom has been considered as deaf and dumb by the people on the ward helps exhibit the control that Nurse Ratched has on the ward in the hospital in Oregon in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout the story, the ward is viewed as a small world of its own regulations, rules, and instruction controlled by Nurse Ratched. However, before the entry of the protagonist Randle P. McMurphy everything in the ward was organized and controlled in Nurse Ratched hands. As McMurphy enters the ward he becomes a warrior and rebel in the ward who has a desire to make Nurse Ratched lose her control and give freedom to the patient’s.
