One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Normality Analysis

Ken Kesey, in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, emphasizes the abuse of psychiatry in the story and everyday life by contrasting society’s liberating interpretation of normal to Big Nurse’s captivating consideration of normal. In today’s society, the idea of a “normal person” forms when the population takes into consideration various characteristics that seem to be present in each individual while organizing the traits to form an identity that “must” apply to everyone around them. Ironically, normality can also apply to ordinary differences as well. For instance, arguments and debates, that heavily rely on opposing opinions, are still considered normal because people recognize that no two minds think alike and disagreements happens so often that it becomes ordinary. That “agree to disagree” aspect of “normality” provides people with a sense of liberation because they are not …show more content…
Fighting back with Big Nurse and actually following through with their plan shows that each patient has the freedom to think for themselves as Big Nurse’s restrictive grasp is starts to loosen. On the boat, the patients start laughing for the first time in years when they are trying to catch a fish. Bromden describes, “I could look down and see myself and the rest of the guys… swinging in laughter that rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast…” (Kesey 215). For the first time in years, the “mentally ill” patients experience an authentic, powerful, and booming laughter when they are finally out of the hospital. Laughter is a crucial part of “society’s normal” because laughter goes hand in hand with the freedom that “society’s normal” promises. In general, people laugh when they are overwhelmed with joy and amusement that their emotions must be physically released. The saying “Laughter is the best medicine,” because it is a way where people can release all of their