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Cuckoo's Nest: The Social Criticism Of Nurse Ratched

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The setting of the novel is in a mental hospital in Oregon in the years of 1950s. The ward is completely under the head nurse Nurse Ratched’s control. Unlike the outside world, inside the ward Nurse Ratched sets all kinds of rules to constraint the patients’ actions and also preventing their mental recovering. As Nurse Ratched holds the absolute power over the ward, she manipulates all the patients to follow her routine, which gradually blow and destroy their masculinity and individualities. The society which isolated by the outside world symbolizes as a minimized matriarchal society which further expressing the social criticism of Kesey, that in order to make significant changes in society, one needs to have the courage to make sacrifice to what they believe.
 Point of View and Significance
Kesey uses first person point of view of Chief Bromden to tell the entire story. In the novel, Bromden is the …show more content…
As Bromden describes her in the first few chapters, she appears as a beautiful woman with prominent feminine traits such as a doll face and her large breasts, but different from most of the women, she dislike her feminine traits. She knows all the weakness of every patients, and like described in the novel, the pecking party, constantly points out them in public when someone shows any signs of protest. On the surface, she pretend to be an angel with mercy, but underneath it she gradually destroy the patients’ individualities and keep their situation worth, let them lose their determination rather than healing them. When she realizes that McMurphy is a huge threat to her control, she keeps consequence him and try to manipulate him as the same of the others. But she eventually failed. At the end of the novel McMurphy finds her weakness and picks it right at the point, exposing her breasts in front of all the other patients and take over all the power she

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