One to One

The weak, powerless, and vulnerable are all types of people society creates through the act of self destruction. The idea of society causing a person’s own self destruction is contradictory, however it is a main theme in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In the novel, patients are admitted to a psychiatric ward when they stray away from following social norms, not because they are sick. The ward is run by Nurse Ratched, a controlling woman who is ironically all about manipulation…

Through the insanity of the book and the relative normality of the film, One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest is drastically different on both platforms. In the book, the ward is a ferocious obstacle course of fog, rapists, a maniacal nurse, and hallucinations that make the Joker seem like an average joe, while the film portrays it more realistically, with doctors who act like doctors, nurses who perform normal nursing duties, and a ward which is as normal as a regular hospital. This is not just the…

This novel, “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” starts with the narrator, Chief Bromden, a schizophrenic patient, waking up in a psychiatric ward of a hospital, where he’s been living for the past ten years. Chief Brodmen describes the hospital as an enormous machine, called the “Combine,” which controls the patients and imposes obedience on them. He pretends to be deaf and dumb allowing him to hear all the secrets on the ward and remain mostly unnoticed in the ward. Nurse Ratched, also known as…

Kesey’s One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest effectively presents powerless individuals mentally and physically imprisoned within a matriarchal system which ultimately dictates their identity. The norm of conformity and lack of comfort and ease is unravelled within the novel. The extreme conditions and barbaric treatment is present within the psychiatric hospital. The brutal nature is reinforced through the disabled chronic having ‘catheter tubes’ which ‘run direct from pant leg to the sewer under the…

A protagonist means it is the main character of the story, they are often considered as a noble hero or a character the audience is supposed to feel most sympathetic for. In the novel, one Flew over the Cuckoo 's nest entitled by Ken Kesey, McMurphy is believed to be the true protagonist of the novel; due to him being a Christ figure to the patients, his rebellion actions against Nurse Ratched and also his effort on helping the patients to gain back their individuality and masculinity,…

There’s power not only in violence but in laughter. Ken Keysey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is about machinery and power of laughter and reveals how your past situations can show how you think in recent situations.These two show how different people think and what they compare objects to, and what laughter does to the people around the person laughing. Chief describes the asylum as an machine-natured system. Not only does Bromden describe the asylum machine-like but also sees society as a…

The World Sucks Okay?! Karl Marx introduced the theory of Marxism in the late 19th century and his ideas are still discussed in contemporary society. Ken Kesey created the world within the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in the 1960s. The psychiatric ward that Kesey’s characters reside in are a metaphor for class structure and society that existed in the 19th, 20th, and even the 20th century. He shows the negative effects of class structure in the world through his characters. The…

The metaphor of machinery in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, shows the mechanization of society which suppresses individuality and free will. Kesey’s clever use of machinery as a metaphor that controls the patients on the ward identifies the problems of American society in the 1950s and 60s. The patients on the ward are victims of a society which demands conformity. The metaphor of machinery points out the rigidity of the system in which everyone should be a “functioning,…

McMurphy’s apparent madness or irrational behavior in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest plays the important role in the novel of being the devil’s advocate highlighting the ills of the mental institutions of the 1960s. His eccentric behavior was despised by the Big Nurse and other authority figures at the mental institution, but McMurphy’s behavior might be judged reasonable if one considers the dehumanizing, sterile, hostage-like situation that the institute’s patients were subjected…

Our society tends to place judgement on a people who are different and reject the norms of society. In the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, the treatment of the patients to become “normal” in the asylum is voluntarily and involuntarily. Some of the patients are in the asylum due to their sexual orientation, having distorted speech and having physical and mental disabilities. The men that are in the ward are afraid to leave because of the judgment from the public or society.…