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The Combine In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest theme essay Tristan Andrews In Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the biggest enemy in the book is the "Combine." The Combine is the oppressive force that keeps society intact and send them to the hospital ward to be "fixed." The whole book has a major emphasis on the combine and how it oppresses individuals into comforting to a mundane mechanized structure of life. It also tries to lesson the value of an individual person, trying to fix their personality to the way society wants it be, not who the person really is. The biggest theme Kesey was trying to get across was how oppressive and mechanized modern society is. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nests "combine" was the perfect way to get this across. …show more content…

It also showed how hard it is to escape it, to keep fighting it or to conform like almost everyone else. The biggest examples I can think of that proves this are how much society had changed for Chief when he saw it again and how everything was almost completely identical, and the on going battle between Nurse Ratchet and McMurphy. Nurse Ratchet and her ward being society, trying to turn the patients into how they see fit so they can be fixed and going to live in society based on society's standards. McMurphy would the individual who would fight against the society he was forced to live in, just wanting to be free and be who he was, and he would do it until the very end. This book could also represent what was happening when it was written. There were lots of ways people were standing up to the society where lived in the 60's. They're were hippies during the Vietnam War, taking a stance for what they believed in and the African-American civil rights movement, where they stood up against their society to change it. The combine in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was to perfect way to show just how oppressive modern society can be, and how bad it could get if people don't stand up to

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