rice1245
06-09-09, 01:41 AM
After many months of toiling over my book and what not it is finally here! And everyone keep in mind that this is about the book not the movie so there will be many moments where you won't know what i'm talking about
So apparently paragraphs don't transfer from copying and pasting from a word document...i'll try to fix it!
K so there are paragraphs now but everything is kinda smooshed, it looks better in a word document i promise
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a story about a hero. A man named Randall Mcmurphy arrives on a mental ward run like an assembly line in a factory. The patients have no free will or independent thought. The Big Nurse runs them down and turns them against each other. Conman Mcmurphy sacrifices his life in order to save the people on the ward. He shows them that they aren’t crazy and inspires them to question authority. He slowly builds up their confidence until they are ready to check out and leave. Kesey utilizes many different symbols and metaphors that help to broaden and accentuate the various themes he presents in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, themes such as sexism, rebellion, martyrdom and the failures of society to function properly. The themes are presented more clearly due to Kesey’s diction, imagery, symbolism and other such literary devices.
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Ken Kesey was an incredibly sexist man. Most of the females in Kesey’s novel are vile, emotionless, emasculating robots. Nurse Ratched, also known as The Big Nurse, is the head of the ward. She is often described as a piece of machinery. Chief Bromden says, “But down inside of her she’s tense as steel” (28). The word “steel” makes one think of hard, cold machines and Nurse Ratched operates as one. She must maintain order at all times.Ironically, she has very large breasts, the symbol of feminism pinned onto the epitome of evil.
Chief Bromden also explains, “I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend to her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants” (29). Her biggest fear is to lose control and deviate from the schedule as a machine is given orders it must follow with no human emotion to interfere. She utilizes fear to manipulate the men around her and instigates fights between them. Everyone on the ward fears her including the staff.It’s important to note that she sends currents to get the results she wants because she does that with human being’s too with electroshock therapy. She sends currents of electricity
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through patients’ brains to get the results she wants. She wants an obedient, subdued mechanically engineered robot for her to keep under control.
Nurse Ratched and all the other females in the story are all ball-cutters. They are constantly suffocating the men’s masculinity. Harding feels inferior to his beautiful wife. She accuses Harding of having homosexual tendencies and always hits on macho men. He feels ashamed of his elegant hands and sensitive gestures so he tries to hide them in an attempt to gain acceptance from his wife. The wife wears the pants in the relationship which definitely puts a damper on Harding’s confidence and masculinity. Harding tells Mcmurphy, “There’s not a man here that isn’t afraid he is losing or has already lost his whambam. We comical little creatures can’t even achieve masculinity in the rabbit world, that’s how weak and inadequate we are” (67). The emasculation that the men feel turns them into fearful rabbits. It makes them lose their spirit and confidence and their ability to function in society dwindles. Thus they are locked up into a mental hospital with more castrating females. Billy Bibbit’s mother severed his balls, metaphorically speaking, at birth. Bibbit’s first stuttering word
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was,“Mom.” His speech impediment began with his overprotective mother. His mother had fond relations with Nurse Ratched. Ratched always used his mother as a threat to get Billy to do what she wanted. Billy’s fear of his mother turned him into a scared, stuttering rabbit. In fact it was the fear of his mother that drove him to commit suicide. He was caught sleeping with a woman, something grown men do, and Nurse Ratched threatened to tell his mother. He feared his mother more than he feared death. The fact that Billy stutters all the time accentuates how the reader views him as a scared rabbit, as Harding had mentioned before. The men on this ward are the rabbits of the rabbit world.
The patients on the ward are very sad excuses of men. Mcmurphy represents a macho man and is also consequently the hero of the story. Chief once described the different smells of the ward. Smells like old-man manure, machine oil and musty shorts. Chief then claimed, “But never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work” (101). Mcmurphy smells like a man. He smells like work which Kesey is trying
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to show is something that a real man does. It makes it sound as though women have no place in the working world and if they did it would harm the masculinity of men.
The whores in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are merely Kesey’s fantasy. He thinks that by having no backbone, and sleeping with nasty men all the time a woman will achieve happiness and bliss. The whores in the novel ask for nothing in return for their services and they are still happy and cheerful. In Michael Meloy’s article, “Fixing Men: Castration, Impotence, and Masculinity in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” he states, “In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, these themes of control, submission and alienation link to gender, representing similar fears of female empowerment and a male power rendered impotent by a sterile social structure” (Meloy 5). Kesey is afraid of woman empowerment and what that would mean for male masculinity. Meloy also says in his article, “that to castrate a male is to take away the very essence of his being, or his spirit” (Meloy 6). So Kesey represents Nurse Ratched as a ball-cutter which takes away man’s spirit. Kesey is implying that women who are in positions of power castrate the male spirit. The whores in the novel
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are just figments of Kesey’s imagination.In Kesey’s mind women are the forerunners of the Combine.
A Combine is a group united to pursue commercial or political interests and is also a machine that cuts off and chews up and spits out a product. The product, in this case, is the patients in the mental ward. The political interest is their treatment. However their treatment is often worse than the ailment. The people in the ward are turned into machines, given orders that they follow like clockwork. Bromden describes, “Everybody: breathe in…and out…in perfect order; hearts all beating at the rate the OD cards have ordered. Sound of matched cylinders” (33). There is no independent thinking, they do what they are told like a machine does what it’s ordered. The way Kesey described this makes it sound as though the people themselves are machines, carrying out their orders and breathing at the rate they were told to.
The Combine is an ineffective tool for ‘fixing’ the mentally ill. In an article called “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Stanley Gold says, “Control of the patient’s behavior rather than any attempt to understand it is the name of the game” (3). That is a perfect
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description of how the Combine is run under Nurse Ratched’s control. All she cares about is keeping a smooth schedule rather than making any attempts to understand mental illness. Harding once said to Mcmurphy, “I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way” (190). During the 1950’s it was very difficult for the world do understand mental illness. They saw it as a problem that needed an answer and a quick fix. If somebody was having conniptions the best and quickest option was lobotomy. The descriptions of electro-shock therapy and lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are disturbingly accurate. Kesey was criticizing the use of these procedures and thinking ahead of his time.
Once in a while a patient isn’t wired under the Combine’s command. Pete once had an outburst, “He stood up straight and steady, and his eyes snapped clear. Usually Pete’s eyes are half shut and all murked up, like there’s milk in them, but this time they came clear as a blue neon” (52). Usually Pete lives in a haze much like the fog machines that Chief describes. The fog is like a distortion of reality, Pete is crazy but this time his eyes have snapped clear. Nurse
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Ratched turns on the fog machines to keep the patients subdued. In this case it is the cause of Pete’s mental block, his eyes and mind are foggy and it makes it hard for him to distinguish reality. Pete smacked one of the black boys that tried to get him under control. The other black boys approached him,
“They were almost to Pete when it suddenly struck them what the other boy should of known, that Pete wasn’t wired under control like the rest of us, that he wasn’t about to mind just because they gave him an order or gave his arm a jerk. If they were to take him they’d have to take him like you take a wild bear or bull…” (53)
Pete came out of his trance, out from under the wiring of the machines, to tell the other patients that, “It’s a lotta baloney” (54). before sinking back into his somber, submissive stature. Pete is a caged animal kept under control by the fog, once he slipped passed the fog he was described as a “wild bear” insinuating freedom.
The fog in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a symbol of control. It is difficult to see through fog, to discern what is real and what’s not. At the beginning of the book Bromden would always use
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the fog to hide from people, like a rabbit. He had given up fighting against it, until Mcmurphy arrived. One night when the fog machines weren’t on, Bromden looked out of the window for the first time. “I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country” (163). Bromden had been locked up there for years and never knew that the hospital was out in the country. This shows just how much the fog distorts their perceptions of reality. He used to see everything with a black outline around it, like a cartoon that wasn’t real. He had always been afraid to look outside and used the fog to hide in it. The fog itself isn’t a real. It is just the extension of power the combine uses to control or subdue the patients. It is intangible but felt by all of the men on the ward.
When Mcmurphy was asking for a vote from the men on the ward to watch a baseball game he was one vote short. Bromden then raised his hand in favor of the game. He describes, “Mcmurphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I’m fair game. He’s doing it, wires… No.
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That’s not the truth. I lifted it myself”(142). The word ‘game’ is important because it means wild animals. Pete was a wild bear when he woke up from his trance. Kesey constantly refers to them as animals only when they’re out of the fog because it makes one think of the ultimate freedom that a wild animal has living in the wilderness. Chief’s immediate thought was that Mcmurphy had wired him up like he had been wired up since he first arrived on the ward. Chief usually has a hard time discerning what is real and what is not and what is true and what is a lie, but for the first time in the book he sounds sure that that is not the truth. He lifted his hand above the fog by his own free will. The patients voting for the baseball game were voting for much more than a world series.
“It’s like that big red hand of Mcmurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse…” (140).
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By raising their hands they are standing up against Nurse Ratched. They are constantly compared to rabbits throughout the book and this is their first act of bravery, led by Mcmurphy. Also the word, “blinking” is important because it makes one think of being born and seeing the world for the first time. The fog is symbolic of being kept in the womb. They’re scared rabbits because they have never left the shelter of the fog since they arrived there.
There are constant connections between the fog and the womb throughout the novel. Since only women have the ability to carry people in their womb the comparison stays true to the theme of sexism throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the beginning of the book Chief felt safe when he hid in the fog. The womb is the ultimate protection for a baby. When Mcmurphy takes the men on a fishing trip, Chief sees the way the combine has changed things since he was last there. “a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects…” (240).
Kesey uses cartoon imagery to further the pettiness of the political interests of the combine. A man named Taber had just arrived
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on the ward and wasn’t behaving like a well engineered machine. He simply asked what was in the medicine they were forced to take so instead of making him take it orally they injected it. This is Bromden’s description of the scene afterwards,
“The technicians go trotting off, pushing the man on the Gurney, like cartoon men, or like puppets, mechanical puppets in one of those Punch and Judy acts where it’s supposed to be funny to see the puppet beat up by the Devil and swallowed headfirst by a smiling alligator.” (37)
The puppets are mechanical because they act upon orders. The technicians are representations of the large machine that controls everybody on the ward. Cartoons are suddenly not funny at all when the characters are real. Kesey is belittling the system used in the medical ward by comparing it to a loony tunes world. The puppets are the patients and the puppeteers are the doctors who lead the patients head first into an alligator. The doctors are making the patients worse off than they were when they originally arrived. The reason the alligator is smiling is because for some reason everyone seems to
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think the therapy is working, that the patients are being ‘cured’ during their time there.
Another important ongoing theme in Kesey’s novel is that of martyrdom and rebellion against tyranny. Nurse Ratched represents the tyrannical dictator with control over everyone. Mcmurphy is the martyr who gives up his life in order to save the victims of the Combine’s treatment.
When Mcmurphy first arrived on the ward one of the first things he does is shake everybody’s hands. “He’s there pulling Ellis’s hand off the wall and shaking it just like he was a politician runnin for something and Ellis’s vote was good as anybody’s” (22). He is picking up everyone’s hands and shaking them just like he picks their hands up out of the fog when he asks for their vote to watch the baseball game. The voting for the baseball game makes one think of this quote because they are choosing Mcmurphy as their savior. Their hands being raised above the fog put them above the distortion of the Combine. Their risen hands are them rebelling against the institution and furthering their own well being and masculinity. Mcmurphy was picking up their hands from the first day he arrived on the ward.
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When Mcmurphy attacks Nurse Ratched after Billy Bibbit kills himself, he isn’t doing it for himself. Bromden explains, “We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting” (318). By attacking Nurse Ratched Mcmurphy knew that he was killing himself. He knew that she couldn’t have the last play or else the Acutes would lose hope. He knew that he couldn’t escape and that it had to be done for the sake of others.
After Mcmurphy attacks Ratched he is taken down by the rest of the staff and lets out a cry,
“A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed a coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care anymore about anything, but himself and his dying.” (318).
Mcmurphy was never under the control of the Combine. He was constantly a wild animal, just as the patients are when they are snapped out of the fog and out from under control of the Combine. Mcmurphy knew what he was giving up when he attacked Ratched.
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Mcmurphy pulled Ratched’s uniform off, exposing her as a woman, not a machine. It showed the men that she isn’t a robot, the Combine isn’t invincible, but women are the source of all evil. In this case Ratched was the source of all evil.
Mcmurphy is trying to teach birds to fly. In Robert P. Waxler’s article “The Mixed Heritage of the Chief: Revisiting the Problem of Manhood in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” he says, “And the biggest bird of all, the Chief, will eventually not only go on a lark (the name of the boat on which Mcmurphy takes “his crew” fishing), but learn to fly without fear over that abstract symbolic order called the Cuckoo’s Nest” (6). A nest is where baby birds are kept before they are ready to fly. For the patients, the mental ward is the Cuckoo’s Nest. They think that they can’t fly for various reasons all derived from female influence but Mcmurphy knows that they are perfectly capable. He builds up their confidence, pulls them out of the fog and teaches them to fly all at great sacrifice of himself.
Mcmurphy doesn’t believe that the men are crazy. When he found out that they aren’t committed, that they are there on their own free will he said, “I can understand it with some of those old guys on
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the ward. They’re nuts. But you, you’re not exactly the everyday man on the street, but you’re not nuts.” (195). The fact that Mcmurphy believes in them raises their confidence. He helps convince them that they don’t need to be in there and they are perfectly capable of facing the world themselves.
In order to accentuate the extent of which Mcmurphy is a martyr, Kesey included many religious allusions.The shock table that Mcmurphy endures is shaped like a cross. In place of thorns there is a crown of electric sparks. It resembles Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus died so that others could live. Mcmurphy died so that the others could wake up from their mental slumber and see through the fog. He died to encourage them to leave the hospital because as Pete once said, “It’s a lotta baloney.”
Also Mcmurphy took them all on a fishing trip. He took exactly twelve of them, the number of Jesus’ disciples. He taught them how to fish which reminds the reader of that old saying, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; you have fed him for a lifetime.” Symbolically, he taught them how to fend for themselves
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and built up their self-esteem. Like Jesus, Mcmurphy was a teacher. He was a replacement parent for all of them.
Although the heroine of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest dies, the story itself is a hopeful one. Mcmurphy knew what had to be done in order to save the others and it worked. Kesey’s themes are still important and relevant today. Except hopefully the sexism one. However it is still important to question authority. The themes in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are exemplified by the various literary devices used by Ken Kesey.
Input is nice but i already turned it in so advice will be ignored :P
So apparently paragraphs don't transfer from copying and pasting from a word document...i'll try to fix it!
K so there are paragraphs now but everything is kinda smooshed, it looks better in a word document i promise
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a story about a hero. A man named Randall Mcmurphy arrives on a mental ward run like an assembly line in a factory. The patients have no free will or independent thought. The Big Nurse runs them down and turns them against each other. Conman Mcmurphy sacrifices his life in order to save the people on the ward. He shows them that they aren’t crazy and inspires them to question authority. He slowly builds up their confidence until they are ready to check out and leave. Kesey utilizes many different symbols and metaphors that help to broaden and accentuate the various themes he presents in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, themes such as sexism, rebellion, martyrdom and the failures of society to function properly. The themes are presented more clearly due to Kesey’s diction, imagery, symbolism and other such literary devices.
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Ken Kesey was an incredibly sexist man. Most of the females in Kesey’s novel are vile, emotionless, emasculating robots. Nurse Ratched, also known as The Big Nurse, is the head of the ward. She is often described as a piece of machinery. Chief Bromden says, “But down inside of her she’s tense as steel” (28). The word “steel” makes one think of hard, cold machines and Nurse Ratched operates as one. She must maintain order at all times.Ironically, she has very large breasts, the symbol of feminism pinned onto the epitome of evil.
Chief Bromden also explains, “I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend to her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants” (29). Her biggest fear is to lose control and deviate from the schedule as a machine is given orders it must follow with no human emotion to interfere. She utilizes fear to manipulate the men around her and instigates fights between them. Everyone on the ward fears her including the staff.It’s important to note that she sends currents to get the results she wants because she does that with human being’s too with electroshock therapy. She sends currents of electricity
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through patients’ brains to get the results she wants. She wants an obedient, subdued mechanically engineered robot for her to keep under control.
Nurse Ratched and all the other females in the story are all ball-cutters. They are constantly suffocating the men’s masculinity. Harding feels inferior to his beautiful wife. She accuses Harding of having homosexual tendencies and always hits on macho men. He feels ashamed of his elegant hands and sensitive gestures so he tries to hide them in an attempt to gain acceptance from his wife. The wife wears the pants in the relationship which definitely puts a damper on Harding’s confidence and masculinity. Harding tells Mcmurphy, “There’s not a man here that isn’t afraid he is losing or has already lost his whambam. We comical little creatures can’t even achieve masculinity in the rabbit world, that’s how weak and inadequate we are” (67). The emasculation that the men feel turns them into fearful rabbits. It makes them lose their spirit and confidence and their ability to function in society dwindles. Thus they are locked up into a mental hospital with more castrating females. Billy Bibbit’s mother severed his balls, metaphorically speaking, at birth. Bibbit’s first stuttering word
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was,“Mom.” His speech impediment began with his overprotective mother. His mother had fond relations with Nurse Ratched. Ratched always used his mother as a threat to get Billy to do what she wanted. Billy’s fear of his mother turned him into a scared, stuttering rabbit. In fact it was the fear of his mother that drove him to commit suicide. He was caught sleeping with a woman, something grown men do, and Nurse Ratched threatened to tell his mother. He feared his mother more than he feared death. The fact that Billy stutters all the time accentuates how the reader views him as a scared rabbit, as Harding had mentioned before. The men on this ward are the rabbits of the rabbit world.
The patients on the ward are very sad excuses of men. Mcmurphy represents a macho man and is also consequently the hero of the story. Chief once described the different smells of the ward. Smells like old-man manure, machine oil and musty shorts. Chief then claimed, “But never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work” (101). Mcmurphy smells like a man. He smells like work which Kesey is trying
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to show is something that a real man does. It makes it sound as though women have no place in the working world and if they did it would harm the masculinity of men.
The whores in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are merely Kesey’s fantasy. He thinks that by having no backbone, and sleeping with nasty men all the time a woman will achieve happiness and bliss. The whores in the novel ask for nothing in return for their services and they are still happy and cheerful. In Michael Meloy’s article, “Fixing Men: Castration, Impotence, and Masculinity in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” he states, “In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, these themes of control, submission and alienation link to gender, representing similar fears of female empowerment and a male power rendered impotent by a sterile social structure” (Meloy 5). Kesey is afraid of woman empowerment and what that would mean for male masculinity. Meloy also says in his article, “that to castrate a male is to take away the very essence of his being, or his spirit” (Meloy 6). So Kesey represents Nurse Ratched as a ball-cutter which takes away man’s spirit. Kesey is implying that women who are in positions of power castrate the male spirit. The whores in the novel
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are just figments of Kesey’s imagination.In Kesey’s mind women are the forerunners of the Combine.
A Combine is a group united to pursue commercial or political interests and is also a machine that cuts off and chews up and spits out a product. The product, in this case, is the patients in the mental ward. The political interest is their treatment. However their treatment is often worse than the ailment. The people in the ward are turned into machines, given orders that they follow like clockwork. Bromden describes, “Everybody: breathe in…and out…in perfect order; hearts all beating at the rate the OD cards have ordered. Sound of matched cylinders” (33). There is no independent thinking, they do what they are told like a machine does what it’s ordered. The way Kesey described this makes it sound as though the people themselves are machines, carrying out their orders and breathing at the rate they were told to.
The Combine is an ineffective tool for ‘fixing’ the mentally ill. In an article called “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Stanley Gold says, “Control of the patient’s behavior rather than any attempt to understand it is the name of the game” (3). That is a perfect
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description of how the Combine is run under Nurse Ratched’s control. All she cares about is keeping a smooth schedule rather than making any attempts to understand mental illness. Harding once said to Mcmurphy, “I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way” (190). During the 1950’s it was very difficult for the world do understand mental illness. They saw it as a problem that needed an answer and a quick fix. If somebody was having conniptions the best and quickest option was lobotomy. The descriptions of electro-shock therapy and lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are disturbingly accurate. Kesey was criticizing the use of these procedures and thinking ahead of his time.
Once in a while a patient isn’t wired under the Combine’s command. Pete once had an outburst, “He stood up straight and steady, and his eyes snapped clear. Usually Pete’s eyes are half shut and all murked up, like there’s milk in them, but this time they came clear as a blue neon” (52). Usually Pete lives in a haze much like the fog machines that Chief describes. The fog is like a distortion of reality, Pete is crazy but this time his eyes have snapped clear. Nurse
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Ratched turns on the fog machines to keep the patients subdued. In this case it is the cause of Pete’s mental block, his eyes and mind are foggy and it makes it hard for him to distinguish reality. Pete smacked one of the black boys that tried to get him under control. The other black boys approached him,
“They were almost to Pete when it suddenly struck them what the other boy should of known, that Pete wasn’t wired under control like the rest of us, that he wasn’t about to mind just because they gave him an order or gave his arm a jerk. If they were to take him they’d have to take him like you take a wild bear or bull…” (53)
Pete came out of his trance, out from under the wiring of the machines, to tell the other patients that, “It’s a lotta baloney” (54). before sinking back into his somber, submissive stature. Pete is a caged animal kept under control by the fog, once he slipped passed the fog he was described as a “wild bear” insinuating freedom.
The fog in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a symbol of control. It is difficult to see through fog, to discern what is real and what’s not. At the beginning of the book Bromden would always use
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the fog to hide from people, like a rabbit. He had given up fighting against it, until Mcmurphy arrived. One night when the fog machines weren’t on, Bromden looked out of the window for the first time. “I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country” (163). Bromden had been locked up there for years and never knew that the hospital was out in the country. This shows just how much the fog distorts their perceptions of reality. He used to see everything with a black outline around it, like a cartoon that wasn’t real. He had always been afraid to look outside and used the fog to hide in it. The fog itself isn’t a real. It is just the extension of power the combine uses to control or subdue the patients. It is intangible but felt by all of the men on the ward.
When Mcmurphy was asking for a vote from the men on the ward to watch a baseball game he was one vote short. Bromden then raised his hand in favor of the game. He describes, “Mcmurphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I’m fair game. He’s doing it, wires… No.
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That’s not the truth. I lifted it myself”(142). The word ‘game’ is important because it means wild animals. Pete was a wild bear when he woke up from his trance. Kesey constantly refers to them as animals only when they’re out of the fog because it makes one think of the ultimate freedom that a wild animal has living in the wilderness. Chief’s immediate thought was that Mcmurphy had wired him up like he had been wired up since he first arrived on the ward. Chief usually has a hard time discerning what is real and what is not and what is true and what is a lie, but for the first time in the book he sounds sure that that is not the truth. He lifted his hand above the fog by his own free will. The patients voting for the baseball game were voting for much more than a world series.
“It’s like that big red hand of Mcmurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse…” (140).
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By raising their hands they are standing up against Nurse Ratched. They are constantly compared to rabbits throughout the book and this is their first act of bravery, led by Mcmurphy. Also the word, “blinking” is important because it makes one think of being born and seeing the world for the first time. The fog is symbolic of being kept in the womb. They’re scared rabbits because they have never left the shelter of the fog since they arrived there.
There are constant connections between the fog and the womb throughout the novel. Since only women have the ability to carry people in their womb the comparison stays true to the theme of sexism throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the beginning of the book Chief felt safe when he hid in the fog. The womb is the ultimate protection for a baby. When Mcmurphy takes the men on a fishing trip, Chief sees the way the combine has changed things since he was last there. “a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects…” (240).
Kesey uses cartoon imagery to further the pettiness of the political interests of the combine. A man named Taber had just arrived
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on the ward and wasn’t behaving like a well engineered machine. He simply asked what was in the medicine they were forced to take so instead of making him take it orally they injected it. This is Bromden’s description of the scene afterwards,
“The technicians go trotting off, pushing the man on the Gurney, like cartoon men, or like puppets, mechanical puppets in one of those Punch and Judy acts where it’s supposed to be funny to see the puppet beat up by the Devil and swallowed headfirst by a smiling alligator.” (37)
The puppets are mechanical because they act upon orders. The technicians are representations of the large machine that controls everybody on the ward. Cartoons are suddenly not funny at all when the characters are real. Kesey is belittling the system used in the medical ward by comparing it to a loony tunes world. The puppets are the patients and the puppeteers are the doctors who lead the patients head first into an alligator. The doctors are making the patients worse off than they were when they originally arrived. The reason the alligator is smiling is because for some reason everyone seems to
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think the therapy is working, that the patients are being ‘cured’ during their time there.
Another important ongoing theme in Kesey’s novel is that of martyrdom and rebellion against tyranny. Nurse Ratched represents the tyrannical dictator with control over everyone. Mcmurphy is the martyr who gives up his life in order to save the victims of the Combine’s treatment.
When Mcmurphy first arrived on the ward one of the first things he does is shake everybody’s hands. “He’s there pulling Ellis’s hand off the wall and shaking it just like he was a politician runnin for something and Ellis’s vote was good as anybody’s” (22). He is picking up everyone’s hands and shaking them just like he picks their hands up out of the fog when he asks for their vote to watch the baseball game. The voting for the baseball game makes one think of this quote because they are choosing Mcmurphy as their savior. Their hands being raised above the fog put them above the distortion of the Combine. Their risen hands are them rebelling against the institution and furthering their own well being and masculinity. Mcmurphy was picking up their hands from the first day he arrived on the ward.
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When Mcmurphy attacks Nurse Ratched after Billy Bibbit kills himself, he isn’t doing it for himself. Bromden explains, “We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting” (318). By attacking Nurse Ratched Mcmurphy knew that he was killing himself. He knew that she couldn’t have the last play or else the Acutes would lose hope. He knew that he couldn’t escape and that it had to be done for the sake of others.
After Mcmurphy attacks Ratched he is taken down by the rest of the staff and lets out a cry,
“A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed a coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care anymore about anything, but himself and his dying.” (318).
Mcmurphy was never under the control of the Combine. He was constantly a wild animal, just as the patients are when they are snapped out of the fog and out from under control of the Combine. Mcmurphy knew what he was giving up when he attacked Ratched.
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Mcmurphy pulled Ratched’s uniform off, exposing her as a woman, not a machine. It showed the men that she isn’t a robot, the Combine isn’t invincible, but women are the source of all evil. In this case Ratched was the source of all evil.
Mcmurphy is trying to teach birds to fly. In Robert P. Waxler’s article “The Mixed Heritage of the Chief: Revisiting the Problem of Manhood in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” he says, “And the biggest bird of all, the Chief, will eventually not only go on a lark (the name of the boat on which Mcmurphy takes “his crew” fishing), but learn to fly without fear over that abstract symbolic order called the Cuckoo’s Nest” (6). A nest is where baby birds are kept before they are ready to fly. For the patients, the mental ward is the Cuckoo’s Nest. They think that they can’t fly for various reasons all derived from female influence but Mcmurphy knows that they are perfectly capable. He builds up their confidence, pulls them out of the fog and teaches them to fly all at great sacrifice of himself.
Mcmurphy doesn’t believe that the men are crazy. When he found out that they aren’t committed, that they are there on their own free will he said, “I can understand it with some of those old guys on
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the ward. They’re nuts. But you, you’re not exactly the everyday man on the street, but you’re not nuts.” (195). The fact that Mcmurphy believes in them raises their confidence. He helps convince them that they don’t need to be in there and they are perfectly capable of facing the world themselves.
In order to accentuate the extent of which Mcmurphy is a martyr, Kesey included many religious allusions.The shock table that Mcmurphy endures is shaped like a cross. In place of thorns there is a crown of electric sparks. It resembles Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus died so that others could live. Mcmurphy died so that the others could wake up from their mental slumber and see through the fog. He died to encourage them to leave the hospital because as Pete once said, “It’s a lotta baloney.”
Also Mcmurphy took them all on a fishing trip. He took exactly twelve of them, the number of Jesus’ disciples. He taught them how to fish which reminds the reader of that old saying, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; you have fed him for a lifetime.” Symbolically, he taught them how to fend for themselves
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and built up their self-esteem. Like Jesus, Mcmurphy was a teacher. He was a replacement parent for all of them.
Although the heroine of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest dies, the story itself is a hopeful one. Mcmurphy knew what had to be done in order to save the others and it worked. Kesey’s themes are still important and relevant today. Except hopefully the sexism one. However it is still important to question authority. The themes in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are exemplified by the various literary devices used by Ken Kesey.
Input is nice but i already turned it in so advice will be ignored :P