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Nurse Ratched And Mcmurphy Essay

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• To what extent could the narrator of the novel be considered unreliable?
The narrator known as Chief could be considered unreliable because on page 69 Harding says that he heard Chief received over two hundred shock treatments. These shock treatments may have down a great deal of damage to his mind. Multiple times throughout the novel Chief mentions that a fog is forming over his mind and all around him. One example of chief mentioning the fog and how no one else can see it is on page 128. Chief also imagines the fog followed by hallucinations of air raids and many other things including the name of the book goes flying through his head on page 284-287.

• Analyze the author’s treatment and characterization of the secondary characters in …show more content…

Both of these generalizations of women are very negative which probably has to do with society as a whole at the time this novel was written. The women in the story are either dedicated to dominating the men around them or trying to please men but almost in a servant kind of way. At the beginning of the book on page 60 Harding is taken apart at a meeting and afterwards Mcmurphy criticizes him for taking that abuse and says nurse Ratched is a ball cutter which the beginning of this view that nurse ratched being a cruel and manipulative person. Harding is the first to tell Mcmurphy “we are victims of a matriarchy here” on page 63. Though this whole book may seem negative towards women, the author includes equality aimed remarks. One example of one of these equality aimed remarks is this statement from Mcmurphy on page 60 “No, that nurse ain’t some kinda monster chicken buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I’ve seen a thousand of ‘em, old and young, men and women.” This quote from Mcmurphy shows the author isn’t completely against women but that there are horrible people like nurse Ratched of both sexes. The novel seems to be a battle between masculinity and feminism or the civilizing of society nurse Ratched attempts to and the freedom of the more natural and wild

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“Man, you’re talkin’ like a fool. You mean to tell me that you’re gonna sit back and let some old blue-haired woman talk you into being a rabbit?”(Kesey,64-65) In this way, McMurphy uses Nurse Ratched as a tool to achieve his own goals, even though he initially saw her as his

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Nurse Ratched is the enermy of the worst kind in this book Nurse Ratched feeds on order, and she wants total power , she plans mind games with her patients. Ratched as the head nurse and as a woman. she is able to move things so that most situations fit her ideas. If Nurse Ratched needs to, she uses the force to get things done. She smiles a lot and verbalizes.

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In Ken Kesey’s comic novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, gender is a definer of one's power in the hospital, and this leads to Nurse Ratched hiding her femininity, the patients’ attempts to boost their own masculinity, and both sides trying to expose the other. Kesey uses these examples to explain that men cannot handle a female leader. Nurse Ratched, a female who is head of the ward, attempts to hide her femininity so the men respect her power. At the beginning of the novel, Bromden is describing the Nurse’s appearance. He states, “A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it” (6).

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It was clear from the beginning of the novel, Chief suffers from hallucinations and most likely has some sort of mental issue. It was also indicated that the main authority figure in the psychiatric ward was Nurse

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Chief is a metal unstable patient, who in the beginning of the story is on a lot of medication. Chief on the other hand is not being himself. By not talking or responding to any nores around him, he made everyone believe he was deaf and mute. “….I know now there is no real help against her or her Combine. McMurphy can’t help any more

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Nurse Ratched is the main antagonist who is a very cruel and manipulative nurse, in which all the characters seem to agree that she is out to get them. The other main female role is a hooker McMurphy knew before the hospital who plays a role of meeting the boys needs. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s

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so it seemed to me. It was if our little school was caught between them, squeezed in some crazy lovers embrace” He has a romantic connection with the fog, he just waits around

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“While the ward remains orderly and on schedule beneath the tyranny of Nurse Ratchet, the men are subdued and drugged beyond any human recognition. The patients are distinguished as either Acute or Chronic, depending on their severity, but within the ward at the very beginning of the novel, they are essentially equal in their actions and humanity” (Maupin-Thomas). This shows that Nurse Rachet is a dictator. The significance of this is in the 1950’s and 60’s is when the cold war was ramping back up. So, this book is a form of anti-Soviet Union propaganda, connecting tyrannical rule of the Soviet Union to nurse rachet.

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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.

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He keeps trying to drag us out where we’d be easy to get at” (Kesey, 128). Here Kesey suggests that the fog is a region where Chief can escape from the pressure of reality and be accepted for who he truly is. This could be thought of as Chief’s comfort zone where he would not like to escape since he has not much to live for. This is contrary to

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Her clothes “could no longer conceal the fact that she was a women”(320). She tries to hide her femininity throughout the whole novel, again because any sign or femininity shows weakness. Nurse Ratched controls all men on the ward and acts as what Kesey characterizes as “manly”. Kesey promotes sexism in this way because of how he characterizes women to look and act in a masculine

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Nurse Ratched has control over every guy in the hospital because she decides what they are doing every day when they wake up. She has brainwashed the men into think they need her. Vera has manipulated her husband Dale into thinking he is disgusting. Billy’s mother has emasculated him by deciding everything for him and letting him have no control over his own life. The men in this novel have lost their manhood to women who have manipulated them and they are too blind to see it till McMurphy shows them.

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