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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest By Ken Kesey

1104 Words5 Pages

The Process of Becoming Sane
An individual’s struggle toward understanding and awareness is the traditional subject for the novelist. In an essay, apply this statement to one novel of literary merit.
Have you ever awakened from a deep sleep and had no conception of where you were or what anything around you was? The analogy of having a foggy head explains what it is like to not be able to comprehend the aspects around you. In Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey uses the metaphor of a cloudy brain and exaggerates it using the character Chief Bromden. Chief has been admitted into an insane asylum because of his inability to “fit into” society in the 1960s because he is an abnormally tall Indian. “I been here on the ward longer’n …show more content…

The author decides to have Chief Bromden narrate this novel even though he is not the most reliable person to explain exactly what he witnesses. However, Kesey starts the text off right away by showing this when Chief explains, “It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen” (8). The author uses this quotation to allow the readers to know that the story they are about to read will be exaggerated from reality. The choice of having an inconsistent narrator who is not the story's protagonist was an intention the author made to show the common subject of an individual’s process to awareness. In the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the director switches the narrator to McMurphy, and therefore, shows that if the novel were to not be in Chief’s perspective we would have no idea the process that Chief had gone through during the storyline. In One Flew Over the …show more content…

Starting Ken Kesey’s novel, Chief had always portrayed himself as “deaf and dumb” (1). The notion of this was used by the author to connect with how much control Chief felt like he possessed. For example, for a small section in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest whenever we were in the presence of Nurse Ratched, she was regarded as huge through Bromden’s eyes and even nicknamed the “Big Nurse” because she maintained so much control over the patients. Consequently, this meant that Chief’s life was controlled by Ratched, therefore, he felt like he had no individuality, which was why the author always had him portrayed as small through his own eyes. In addition, due to the fog from the medication, his mind would exaggerate the aspects he would witness. “She blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor” (5). The reader can infer that the nurse was not actually blowing up but instead just infuriating, however, the author utilizes this quote to represent the fact that the haze in Chief’s head is prohibiting him from perceiving

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Chief characterizes the Nurse as almost robotic in her manipulation and intimidation. In the first chapter of the book, Chief Bromden illustrates how Nurse Ratched uses her position in the ward to control the patients. Chief says, “The big nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use; she’ll point out to an Acute, whenever he goes into a sulk, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is engineered for your cure, or you’ll end up over on that side” (18). Nurse Ratched uses her power in the ward to manipulate and control the patients. This is important because with the Nurse's control, the patients are unable to think and act for themselves.

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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”.

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Chief Bromden, nicknamed “Chief Broom” because the aides make him sweep the halls, narrates One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Although he says that he is telling the story about “the hospital, and her, and the guys—and about McMurphy,” he is also telling the story of his own journey toward sanity. When the novel begins, Bromden is paranoid, bullied, and surrounded much of the time by a hallucinated fog that represents both his medicated state and his desire to hide from reality. Moreover, he believes that he is extremely weak, even though he used to be immensely strong; because he believes it, he is extremely weak. By the end of the novel, the fog has cleared, and Bromden has recovered the personal strength to euthanize McMurphy, escape from the hospital, and record his account of the events.

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest By Ken Kesey

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Chief is an example of someone that had their individuality destroyed by her through too many sessions of EST. After Miss Ratched is described, the reader is informed about the black boys and is made known, “They are in contact on a high-voltage wave length of hate, and the black boys are out there performing her bidding before she even thinks it” (Kesey 31). Shaped by Miss Ratched, the black boys are described by Chief Bromden as machines that automatically attend to what she wants done. Often they are part of the destroying of the individuality of the patients and shaping them into society.

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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.

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It shows he has psychological problems. In the film audiences were not given this information, therefore it give the impression that Chief does not have any psychological abnormalities. This makes the film less effective because throughout this story mental illness of Chief plays a huge part. It helps readers understand why Chief is a patient of the mentally ill and it indirectly created a bond between him and McMurphy. For example, if Chief was not mentally ill, he wouldn’t think he was “small in size” and McMurphy wouldn’t offer to help Chief gain back his size; “make him

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“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

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Ken Kesey uses his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to describe the lives of patients in a mental institution, and their struggle to overcome the oppressive authority under which they are living. Told from the point of view of a supposedly mute schizophrenic, the novel also shines a light on the many disorders present in the patients, as well as how their illnesses affect their lives during a time when little known about these disorders, and when patients living with these illnesses were seen as an extreme threat. Chief Bromden, the narrator of the novel, has many mental illnesses, but he learns to accept himself and embrace his differences. Through the heroism introduced through Randle McMurphy, Chief becomes confident in himself, and is ultimately able to escape from the toxic environment Nurse Ratched has created on the ward. Chief has many disorders including schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and, in addition to these illnesses, he pretends to be deaf and dumb.

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