Bureaucracy In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, helps demonstrate the affects of bureaucracy both good and bad by showing how the need for standard procedure can be positive by creating structure and order, yet negative by the unwieldy, rigidity that cements it in place. This rigidity creates a mechanized environment in which the monotonous daily routines of the patients insure conformity and helps quell any resistance, as much as Nurse Ratched’s oppressive control of the ward insures conformity. The book begins with the narrator, Chief Bromden; awakening in a fog which he believes is one of the Nurse’s ways of controlling him and the other patients on the ward. Bromden is constantly mocked by the aides in the ward because he feigns being

After Bromden successfully lifts the enormous control panel, winning McMurphy bets with the other patients, Bromden tells McMurphy about the other patients’ unease. The patients who attended the fishing trip are ordered to be given a shower, during which George Sorenson panics and a fight ensues between the aides and McMurphy and Bromden. Nurse Ratched sends both Bromden and McMurphy to the electroshock treatment with McMurphy sustaining multiple shocks over the course of the next days. Eventually, McMurphy is brought back to the ward acting as if nothing had happened. The night of Billy and Candy’s date arrives and the Acutes on the ward break into the medicine cabinet, getting drunk and high different medications. McMurphy plans to escape before the morning shift comes on, but succumbs to the alcohol and drugs falling asleep with Sandy, Candy’s prostitute friend. In the morning, the mayhem is discovered by the staff with Billy being found in an isolation room with Candy. Nurse Ratched threatens to tell Billy’s domineering mother about this causing Billy to panic, slitting his own throat while locked in Doctor Spivey’s office. McMurphy attacks Ratched nearly choking her to death, but is subdued and taken to be lobotomized. Upon his return McMurphy has become unresponsive, a vegetable. Bromden suffocates him and then escapes by throwing the

The patients within the ward illustrate the consequences of a society in which there is perceived “correct” behavior and those who do not display this behavior are ostracized from society. While some of the patients in the hospital were truly mentally ill, many were only incapable of adjusting to society with their flaws to the point they would rather live under Ratched’s authority than attempt to exist outside of the asylum. The characters such as Billy, Harding and Sorenson all suffer no mental illness but only suffer the social stigmatization accompanied by their “flaws” which are a respectively a stutter, homosexuality and a phobia of dirt. The shunning of people who behaved differently was evident in the Counterculture Movement by the disparaging attitudes aimed towards people who were unsatisfied with society and made the decision to raise awareness of this