Examples Of Allegory In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the prolific Christian imagery serves not only to align the protagonist, Randle McMurphy, with Jesus Christ, but to provide an overarching allegory: only God can rescue mankind from the inexorable, bleak future it will spawn. The novel suggests that the bleak, oppressive future is caused by the presence of societal constraints, since government is inherently flawed as are the humans that created and maintain it. The depraved future is fully realized through the careful, populist affectations of the Combine which bely its emasculating ways. Functioning as a modern-day version of Christ, McMurphy, persists in his contrarian, self-immolating efforts to deliver his peers--his disciples--from the evils

The overarching allegory proposes that McMurphy--who is God--is lifeblood to the patients in the Combine (representative of Jesus’ disciples), and the only way they can be rescued is by investing in Him. Only the Messiah, the allegory claims, can save humanity from the bleak future it has created. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest suggests that the oppressive reality of the Combine is brought on by the presence of social constraints--in this case, the Therapeutic Community, which the Doctor says is a “democratic ward, run completely by the patients and their votes,” and the intention of which is to be “a little world Inside that is a made-to-scale prototype of the big world Outside” (Kesey 49-50). Such statements underscore the sheer hypocrisy the Combine operates and thrives on, as shown by the blatantly unjust World Series vote, where Nurse Ratched declared there were “forty patients...and only twenty voted” and “[they] must have a majority to change ward policy” (Kesey 140). This supposed pretension of a democracy can also be seen as a commentary on the current, real-life democracy of the United States, where many believe the system is rigged against them and is set up for failure--for example, with ridiculous, paradoxical conditions such as requiring “a majority” to change a policy already ratified by a majority. Regardless, the allegory

The Bible does not paint a rosy picture about the fate of mankind. Whether it is Jesus warning about natural and cosmological catastrophes, plagues, and times of great deception, or the apostle John’s hellacious account of the end of the age, Scripture paints a picture of things getting worse before they get better. Likewise, in dystopian fiction, the emphasis is placed on “mis-orderings of worldly existence and salvation becomes seen as alleviation from those conditions” (Montevecchio 2). Dystopia is essentially an admission of depravity, illustrating “the possibility of sinister, rather than benign, forces moulding the future” (Albinski 12). Man is a wolf to man. We are the anti-Midas: everything we touch rots. And the larger the contribution, the more pervasive the decomposition. Dystopia is an affirmation of a Christian worldview, one which admits that no earthly power can save us from