More handpicked essays just for you.
Ken kesey's style in one flew over the cuckoo's nest
Metaphors and symbolism in one flew over the cuckoos nest book
Symbolic imagery of novel one who flew over the cuckoos nest
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Ken kesey's style in one flew over the cuckoo's nest
He keeps himself away from the Acutes and Chronics by pretending to be deaf and dumb (“One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” 6). The ironic thing about the story is that he [Bromden] is the narrator, telling the reader about everything hears. Bromden is a main character who does what he’s told when he’s told; “Stick a mop in my hand and motion to the spot they aim for me to clean today, and I go” (Kesey 3). If he’s caught slackin’, they’ll whack him in the back of the knees with a handle from whatever they’ve got in hand to get him moving. As the reader gets farther in the novel, they’ll notice how Bromden starts to do what McMurphy says
We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world…’”. With this description, Kesey creates a depressing mood as the patients realize their fate of being in there for the rest of their lives. He also makes the reader feel sympathetic for the patients by creating a gloomy image of these hopeless men. Furthermore, Kesey uses this graphic language to show some of the terrible flaws that occur in some of the psychiatric hospitals. For instance, when Chief Bromden described what had happened to another patient, who had questioned what was in his medicine, by saying, “And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later, bald and the front of his face an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs stitched one above each eye”.
As Bromden grew as person, McMurphy has now been stripped of his rights as a person, which is evident by Bromden’s actions. Ken Kesey
I felt like I was flying. Free (Kesey, pg. 324).” Sure he broke the rules and escaped the hospital, but think about it: when you feel oppressed for so long and that you’re good as dead, you need to do something to change that, because you can choose happiness it’s just a matter of you fighting to get it. That is exactly what Bromden did. Another lesson is when Bromden says “Machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired (Kesey, pg. 16).”
(Kesey 123). Bromden realized that McMurphy was trying to teach them that in order to survive, the patients needed to step out of their comfort zones and be free from safety. McMurphy realized that the fog was like a security blanket to Bromden and that he needed to get rid of it in order to gain his confidence back. He wanted Bromden to realize that he was more than just a patient in a mental institution. He wanted him to realize that his life had purpose.
Ken Kesey’s comic novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, takes place in an all-male psychiatric ward. The head of the ward, Big Nurse Ratched, is female. Kesey explores the power-struggle that takes place when the characters challenge gender dynamics in this environment. One newly-arrived patient, McMurphy, leads the men against the Big Nurse. The story is told through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a patient who learns from McMurphy and fights for his freedom.
In the novel, Kesey employs many characters, each with unique features. For example, Dale Harding, one of the protagonists in the story, was described as, “... a flat, nervous man ...” (Kesey 20) and in one of the group discussion lead by Nurse Ratched, he was reported of saying
Additionally, his ability to have full awareness triggers the newfound sense of confidence in himself that he uses to finally escape from the ward. One night when Bromden is lying awake in the ward, he describes, “I was seeing lots of things different. I figured the fog machine had broke down in the walls when they turned it up too high for that meeting on Friday... For the first time in years I was seeing people with none of that black outline they used to have, and one night I was even able to see out the window” (Kesey 162).
This silence is literally and figuratively represented through Chief Bromden, a longtime patient of a psychiatric ward during the 1960s in the United States. Bromden, along with all the other patients in the ward, religiously abide by the rules and regulations enforced by the ward administration, particularly Nurse Ratched, a strict and abusive manipulator who does anything in order to maintain her power. This power dynamic quickly evolves
Chief Bromden is a quiet patient that pretends to be deaf and mute. His transition to being a narrator is an important metamorphosis from his state of silence. As Thomas Scally states, “The Chief's movement from the pretense of deaf-mute to the status of narrator means to him that he has once again become "big" enough to resist the forces of the Combine” (Scally). Through the narrative, Chief Bromden constantly has delusions of a world controlled by the Combine. This group's intentions are to force conformity and total control on the world.
The question of sanity becomes apparent when McMurphy, a confident gambler, who might have faked psychosis in order to get out of the work farm, is assigned to the mental hospital. He quickly stirs up tension in the ward for Nurse Ratched by encouraging the men to have fun and rebel against her rules. Brodmen appears to be sane for the most part, despite his hallucinations of a fog, which seems to be the result of something both the ward and the world has done to him. He is able to think logically and though others believe him to be deaf and dumb, he uses this to his advantage. Chief states, “They don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby because they think I'm deaf and dumb.
“I been silent so long now it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened this is too awful to be the truth! .. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it, But it is the truth even if it did not happen” (Kesey 89). This quote explains that Chief Bromden has a sense of not seeing things from an everyday perspective. Bromden sees modern society as a huge, oppressive conglomeration that he calls the Combine and the
The fog begins to appear when Nurse Ratched gains full control and power over the men. However, they “haven’t really fogged the place full force all day, not since McMurphy came in” (78). Bromden’s hallucinations incorporate a thick fog that begins to fade only with McMurphy’s arrival to the ward. The fog represents an escape from reality for Bromden as well as the “pollution” the mechanical nature of society has developed. Bromden physically cannot see through the fog without the help of McMurphy: the beacon of hope that follows his natural impulses.
Kesey has used characterisation to get the idea that in this novel there are aspects of venerability and strength. In Nurse Ratched’s case, Kesey has made it so that she is shown with strength and power over the whole ward, including the black men in white, other nurses, and mainly the patients. An example of Nurse Ratched’s power over the patients is when she says to Billy Bibbit, “What worries me, Billy, ' she said- I could hear the change in her voice- 'is how your mother is going to take this.” This shows how one sentence was able to debilitate Billy into begging Nurse for forgiveness and restraint of telling his mother.
Both Robert Frost's poems, “After Apple-Picking” (1914) and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923), like many other of his poems, discuss the human necessity to choose between nature and civilization. Frost grew up in New Hampshire, and so he was influenced by the New England region landscape, history and culture. Frost emphasizes local color and natural elements of the woods, orchards, fields, and small towns. His poems are affected by events and emotions he experienced in everyday life; his speakers go through thick forests, snowy landscape and pick apples in orchards. His elusive style sometimes leads the reader to misunderstand the theme of the poem.
