Cuckoo's Nest: An Analysis

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” This quote by T.S. Eliot introduces the idea of how much one will risk to get what is desired. Whether the desired goal is money, love, revenge, or freedom, many would put their own life, or someone else’s, on the line. Many people act purely on the idea of personal gain, not the possibility of something going wrong, or someone getting hurt. A person is willing to risk their own health, identity, and other people. Many are willing to risk their own health to get what is wanted. This topic is explained in many pieces of literature. John Green’s book The Fault in Our Stars touches on this, especially in the aspect of risking it all for love. Augustus and Hazel …show more content…
Literature is full of stories of people using each other to achieve a goal. One example is Ken Kesey’s story One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Nurse Ratched and McMurphy are known in this novel to butt heads, but when McMurphy brings women and alcohol into the ward, causing a terrible morning, including the death of Billy Bibbit, Ratched was pushed too far. Shortly after Nurse Ratched ensures that no similar acts by McMurphy will occur; she arranges a lobotomy for McMurphy. Nurse Ratched willingly risks McMurphy’s life to return her ward back to normal. She had grown tired of McMurphy’s antics, so risked everything to make it stop, to make her life easier.The story of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” by Edgar Allen Poe, shows that humankind has been risking the lives of others to achieve a goal for centuries. The Spanish took the narrator of this story and tortured him in a dark room, all because he refused to convert to a different faith. They had no problem putting the narrator’s life on the line just because he chose not to convert. Many thought that by torturing those who rejected their faith would scare others into joining. Both of these stories described the characters willingness to risk the lives of others. These two classic works of literature display that human nature, since the beginning of time, has been risking …show more content…
Kesey and Krakauer are two authors that explored this subject. Kesey explained McMurphy’s sudden change in personality on the ward to do recent information he had learned in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. At the pool one day, McMurphy had learned that many patients were not admitted, but could leave whenever they wanted, but he could not. Nurse Ratched had been in control of McMurphy’s release from the ward. He was willing to change himself, even for a short amount of time, to try to get out of the ward. Krakauer also describes Chris’ ability to change his personality, even taking on the name Alexander Supertramp, to escape from society. Chris McCandless wrote "So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun," (Krakauer 57). Chris became tired of mainstream society so he took on a new identity and changed his life, to enjoy new