One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Simerpreet Kaur
Ms. Danielle Dean
ENG-4U
16/4/2012
Point of view:
This entire book is told in a first person point of view. We see everything through Chief
Bromden’s eyes. He narrates the entire story. His personal experiences, judgements,
prejudices and perspectives are integrated in the story. This is proved when the story begins
with Chief Bromden telling the readers what he sees the three African-American aides doing
and he refers to himself as “I”. To quote the book, the author wrote,
“Here’s the Chief. The soo-pah Chief, fellas. Ol’ Chief Broom. Here you go, Chief Broom. ...”Stick a mop in my hand and motion to the spot they aim for me to clean today, and I go. One
swats the backs of my legs with a broom handle to hurry me past. (Kesey 3)
In some parts of the book, Chief Bromden also adds his own experiences and often has
flashbacks. For example, when he narrates the story of what happened to his father and
their family land when government officials indirectly forced him to sell the land.
1
Introduction:The story starts off with Chief Bromden only observing and narrating all the characters and their actions.An overview of what goes on in the hospital is given like the specific timings of medication and some of the treatments.
Rising action:McMurphy realises that his rebellious attitude will only get him into trouble.Cheswick commits suicide.McMurphy breaks the glass of the Nurses’ Station to make sure the Nurse does not get her hopes up and feel like she has won again.McMurphy also organises a fishing trip.
Climax:After the fishing trip, Nurse Ratched forces everyone to be “disinfected”.Chief Bromden and McMurphy get into a fist fight with the aides to defend George, who despises dirt and soap.Both of them get moved to disturbed even though they won the fight.
Falling action:The Chief follows McMurphy’s advice to build his body back to its maximum capability.McMurphy and Chief Bromden are given electroshock therapy.The patients have a party in the ward with alcohol, drugs and prostitutes. They are caught by the aides the next morning.Billy Bibbit is threatened by the Nurse and he commits suicide as well.
Conclusion:The Nurse blame McMurphy for everything.McMurphy loses his temper and attacks the Nurse which causes him to be moved to be sent for lobotomy.McMurphy comes back a vegetable from lobotomy.Chief Bromden cannot stand watching McMurphy suffer, so he suffocates and kills him.Chief Bromden escapes the asylum.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Plot:
2
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Parallel structures:
McMurphy does everything he can to help everybody in the ward. He gets the ‘tub room’
reopened as a game room, organises a fishing trip and sets up a date for Billy Bibbit. He
has problems of his own while he is helping solve theirs. He remembers and is haunted
by his childhood past when he passes by his old house after the fishing expedition. He
sacrifices his life to help these insane people become sane in a more humane manner.
After his lobotomy which was ordered by the Nurse, he becomes a vegetable and Chief
Bromden kills him in his sleep.
Nurse Ratched is trying to make sure her power and authority in the ward is not over
thrown. She constantly tries to get all the patients in the ward to go against McMurphy
to break the rebellion. Being the superintendant, she cannot stand it when the ward uses
their power of democracy against her to get what they want. She runs some kind of
secret operation in the hospital that is only revealed every night, which Chief Bromden
finds out later on in the book. In the end, she still loses her control over everything.
We see Chief Bromden’s character develop from a coward to someone capable
throughout the book. He is the quiet observer who is let in on every secret in the ward
because nobody knows about his deaf and dumb act. He discovers the secret operation
being run the hospital on the night when he does not take his medication. He builds his
confidence and physical body using McMurphy’s ‘training’. In the end, he kills McMurphy
to end his misery and uses McMurphy’s idea to escape through the window in the tub
room by crashing it with a heavy bolted control panel.
3
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Characters:
Chief Bromden
Half-native American man: His father was a local Indian and his mother was a white
woman.
Pretends to be deaf and dumb: He suffers from paranoia and hallucinations. So he
prefers to keep to himself. Although he has a large physique, he has lost his confidence to
speak.
He calls society ‘The Combine’ because he believes that it is controlled by machines: He
repeatedly uses the word ’Combine’ to describe the so-called civilised society that is
apparently controlled by machines.
He is a positive supporting character in the story: He makes morally right perceptions and
takes proper actions. He helps McMurphy in the end although he kills him because he
ends McMurphy’s misery of living as a vegetable the rest of his life.
Randle P. McMurphy
A gambler: He gambles and bets with everyone in the ward. He bets with the other
patients that he can disturb the Nurse to make her lose her ‘always calm and collected’
attitude.
Picks fights very often: He gets involved in a fist fight with the boat’s captain on the
fishing trip and then with the aides back in the ward when they were trying to force
George Sorenson to get cleaned up.
Rude, harsh, sarcastic and vulgar: He uses profanity throughout the story. He tries to get
Billy Bibbit to lose his virginity. He speaks rudely to the Nurse and her aides.
4
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
He is the novel’s protagonist: He rebels against the Nurse and her team on behalf of the
entire ward. He is seen to be the hero in the story because he sacrificed his life for them.
Manipulative: He manipulates and uses Doctor Spivey during group meetings and the
fishing expedition. He uses Sandy and Candy to carry out his plans to help everyone on
the ward.
Nurse Ratched
The tyrannical head nurse of the ward: She controls everyone to get things done her way;
the ward superintendent, the ultimate authority demanding obedience and perfect order
from everyone. She is manipulative as well. She uses her staff as well to overpower
McMurphy.
The antagonist of the novel: She is portrayed the negative character in every way. She is
pretentious, fake and described to always have “a doll face with a painted smile”.
Described as “enormous, capable of swelling up bigger and bigger to monstrous
proportions” when she is upset.
Tone:
The tone of this novel is sympathetic. The author describes the situation of the patients in
the ward in a voice of pity. He uses words like “poor old Taber”. This incepts an emotion of
lost humanity. However, he still portrays their dignity through their ability to differentiate
between right and wrong like when Chief Bromden tells McMurphy that it was not right for
McMurphy to use him as a thwart the aides while defending George Sorensen. Still, they are
unable to comprehend reality. Moreover, he is sympathetic towards the staff that is
corrupted from the very position they are put in.
5
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Setting:
This novel is set in a mental hospital in Oregon in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. We know
this because in one part of the story, McMurphy mentions the name of the state of Oregon.
We can decipher the time setting from Chief Bromden’s memory of World War II. Therefore,
it can be concluded that Chief Bromden is talking about the recent past.
Symbolic level:
Fog: Chief Bromden believes that the fog he frequently sees is made by Nurse Ratched. He
believes she does this to cut communication in the ward. In actual fact, this is not a literal or
physical fog. It is the Chief’s ‘foggy’ mind that cannot think clearly. He hallucinates in these
‘fogs’. So when he says “the fog is getting thicker nowadays”, he only means that he cannot
think clearly.
Pecking party: An obvious and straightforward analogy used in the novel is when McMurphy
explains to Harding that the group meetings held by the ward staff is a ‘pecking party’. The
following quote explains it:
“The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the
flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin’ party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it
—with chickens—is to clip blinders on them. So’s they can’t see.”Harding laces his long fingers around a knee and draws the knee toward him, leaning back in
the chair. “A pecking party. That certainly is a pleasant analogy, my friend.”“And that’s just exactly what that meeting I just set through reminded me of, buddy, if you
want to know the dirty truth. It reminded me of a flock of dirty chickens.”“So that makes me the chicken with the spot of blood, friend?”
“That’s right, buddy.” (Kesey 51)
6
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Here, McMurphy tries to explain that the Nurse’s actions are only tearing the men in the
ward apart. They are forced to hurt each other because of the way she questions, or more
like interrogates them. After that, Harding explains his philosophy of rabbits and wolves to
McMurphy which represent the weak and strong people in the community respectively.
Themes:
Some of the themes in this novel are, law and order, insanity, manipulation, power, and
freedom and confinement.
The central theme is insanity. Although most of the characters are mentally ill, there is a
fine line between being "normal" and "insane". The major difference is fear. This is proved
when Harding says that most of in voluntary patients in the ward could live in the ‘Outside
World” if they had the guts; because they do not have the courage, they find safety comfort
in being labelled "crazy." The Chief states that he is able to fool everyone with this fine line
of fear that he is deaf and dumb and everyone buys his act. He says:
They don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby because they think I'm deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I'm cagey enough to fool them that
much. If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years. (Kesey 4)
References:
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Maryborough: Penguin, 2008. Print.
ISBN: 978-0I4I-03749-3
7