One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Literary Analysis

The Cuckoo's Classic Within the United States of America, twenty six percent of the population eighteen and older suffer from a mental disorder. While today we do not use people like Nurse Ratched to treat mental health patients, people still suffer from mental disorders. The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest uses the realities of the mental institutions of its day to tell a story of the morals of the insane and the sane. To do this, the author, Ken Kesey, used several different literary devices, conflicts and themes throughout the book. The book is a classic because Kessy created a memorable protagonist and a compelling moral battle that he has to fight and ultimately lose in order to win. The first way that the author Ken Kesey is

The main theme of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is sanity versus insanity. The theme is apparent to the reader from the first scene, where McMurphy enters the room and says, “Which one of you claims to be the craziest?... Who's the bull goose loony here?”. He has lots of energy and is avoiding the black boys while the rest of the patients are just watching all the commotion quietly. After getting settled in the hospital McMurphy talks to the patients and tells them that they are men and should be able to stand up to the Nurse. They are afraid of her because they believe that they are weak and are afraid of the “combine” or as the reader can infer, the hospital system in place. McMurphy challenges this in the meetings where he argues with the nurse about different topics. The topics range from simple things like starting a basketball team, to changing the time that they watch tv. The nurse almost always rebukes these things because she believes these are not as she puts it, “in the best interest of the other patients” and then will belittle the other patients if they side with McMurphy. As the two of them argue and fight back and forth, the other patients slowly begin to see that they are sane and are better than what Nurse Ratched wants them to believe. They rally behind McMurphy and side with him in meetings on different things that he puts

While the main conflict and antithesis of the story is the battle between McMurphy and Ratched, the secondary conflicts within the story is the redemption of Chief Bromden and the physical struggle with the control panel. At the beginning of the story, Bromden is an Indian janitor who has been at the ward for a long time. Everybody believes that he is blind and even though he is quite a large person, he does not fight against the guards. He can speak English, but because he is afraid he doesn’t say anything, people think that he is deaf and mute. Throughout the book he is the narrator and tells the story from a strange perspective because he believes that he sees things that are not there. One of the most frequent things that he thinks that he sees is fog surrounding the patients on the ward. He also believes that the hospital is a giant machine designed to kill the patients that go there and at the center of it is the nurses station which is controlled by Nurse Ratched. At one point in the middle of the beginning of the second part of the book, he has a dream about the machine and all of its torture devices that it uses on the patients. Eventually McMurphy really starts to notice him after he notices that Bromden saw him lift an old control panel that was stuck in the cement floor, as described in the book, “I could lift it all right. Well, hell, right over there you are: