Nurse Ratched’s Ward is Ruled Like a Totalitarian Society A totalitarian society is defined as a society that is ruled by a single person and that society requires full obedience of the people in that society. In the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the ward of the mental hospital acts like a totalitarian society. The three symbols of this society are that Nurse Ratched is the dictator of the patients, the patients and the staff are trained to follow Ratched’s command, and people who do not follow the Big Nurse’s orders are punished. Kesey makes the ward of the hospital the symbol of a totalitarian society. The first factor of Kesey’s totalitarian society is that Nurse Ratched is the dictator of the ward, controlling every aspect of
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Another form of Nurse Ratched’s dictatorship over the ward is the rationing of the cigarettes, even though the cigarettes are the property of the men in the ward, “ ‘Yeah, Doc, what about our cigarettes? How does she have the right to keep the cigarettes— our cigarettes— piled up on her desk in there like she owned them, bleed a pack out to us now and again whenever she feels like it.’ ‘I feel Doctor, that three or four and sometimes five packages of cigarettes a day [are] entirely too [much] for a man to smoke. That is what seemed to be happening last week— after Mr. …show more content…
Ratched has a schedule of everything that the patients do on a daily basis, even if though this is one of Chief Bromden’s, the narrator, hallucinations , “So after the nurse gets her staff, efficiency locks the ward like a watchman's clock. Everything the guys think and say and do is all worked out months in advance, based on the little notes the nurse makes during the day. This is typed and fed into the machine I hear humming behind the steel door in the rear of the Nurses' Station. A number of Order Daily Cards are returned, punched with a pattern of little square holes. At the beginning of each day the properly dated OD card is inserted in a slot in the steel door and the walls hum up: Lights flash on in the dorm at six-thirty: the Acutes up out of bed quick as the black boys can prod them out, get them to work buffing the floor, emptying ash trays, polishing the scratch marks off the wall where one old fellow shorted out a day ago, went down in an awful twist of smoke and smell of burned rubber.” (Kesey 31-32). This quote shows how Ratched plans everything of the patients’ lives. Ratched dies not only control the patients, but controls the staff, the black boys who supervise the patients, “ Years of training, and all three black boys tune in closer and closer with the Big Nurse’s frequency. She never gives orders out loud or leaves written instructions
Another form of Nurse Ratched’s dictatorship over the ward is the rationing of the cigarettes, even though the cigarettes are the property of the men in the ward, “ ‘Yeah, Doc, what about our cigarettes? How does she have the right to keep the cigarettes— our cigarettes— piled up on her desk in there like she owned them, bleed a pack out to us now and again whenever she feels like it.’ ‘I feel Doctor, that three or four and sometimes five packages of cigarettes a day [are] entirely too [much] for a man to smoke. That is what seemed to be happening last week— after Mr. …show more content…
Ratched has a schedule of everything that the patients do on a daily basis, even if though this is one of Chief Bromden’s, the narrator, hallucinations , “So after the nurse gets her staff, efficiency locks the ward like a watchman's clock. Everything the guys think and say and do is all worked out months in advance, based on the little notes the nurse makes during the day. This is typed and fed into the machine I hear humming behind the steel door in the rear of the Nurses' Station. A number of Order Daily Cards are returned, punched with a pattern of little square holes. At the beginning of each day the properly dated OD card is inserted in a slot in the steel door and the walls hum up: Lights flash on in the dorm at six-thirty: the Acutes up out of bed quick as the black boys can prod them out, get them to work buffing the floor, emptying ash trays, polishing the scratch marks off the wall where one old fellow shorted out a day ago, went down in an awful twist of smoke and smell of burned rubber.” (Kesey 31-32). This quote shows how Ratched plans everything of the patients’ lives. Ratched dies not only control the patients, but controls the staff, the black boys who supervise the patients, “ Years of training, and all three black boys tune in closer and closer with the Big Nurse’s frequency. She never gives orders out loud or leaves written instructions