...In the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the mental hospital is very strict with lots of structure. This causes many thing to happen that doesn’t necessarily have to happen. It's almost as if the patients are antagonized to overreact at points in the movie. As a human being we should be able to make our own choices, therefor its important to be able to make your own choices to feel like you are an individual. Not to mention, I would think it would be improvement to have the patients working together as a team, but Nurse Ratched didn’t reward or even compliment them on working as a team. Instead she punished them. Working as a team is an key element of human behavior, because at this point your not just thinking about yourself but of others feelings too. These situations are all very unethical to me, I believe no matter what state you are in, mental or sane,...
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...Gender Roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest The 1950’s was a decade characterized by traditional gender roles of women as homemakers downgraded to the domestic sphere and men as economic providers. With the arrival of the 1960’s, however, stereotypical gender roles were challenged and the American society underwent a variety of social transformations. American writers, such as Ken Kesey, responded to the change through writing. Kesey’s response to the times was his 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is not only a social commentary about mental illness, but also a response to changing gender roles. By demonizing powerful women and uplifting powerful men, his novel promotes sexism and ultimately holds the misogynistic stance that powerful women must be subjugated. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the female characters can be divided into two extreme categories: "ball-cutters" and whores. The negative portrayal of powerful women can be seen in the problematic relationships that the male patients have with their mothers. Bromden, the half Native-American narrator, has a mother who constantly undermines his father, the chief of the Columbia Gorge tribe and a once-powerful man. Bromden’s mother dominates her husband and her son by acting in non-traditional ways, such as using her maiden name for the family’s last name rather than using her husband’s, which convinces Bromden’s father that he is weak and helpless. Because she herself is white, she is ashamed...
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...In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Randle McMurphy struggles to free himself under the dominating power of Nurse Ratched. The power struggle between the two demonstrates the need for free will. When McMurphy enters the halls of the mental ward in Oregon, he finds a group of men beaten into obedience by the head nurse of the ward. Nurse Ratched’s power over the patients extends beyond their actions into their minds. She controls their every second from where they have to be at eight o’clock in the morning to what their beliefs are. McMurphy disrupts this routine by openly disregarding the rules that Nurse Ratched placed. Throughout the novel, McMurphy continuously attempts to eliminate Nurse Ratched’s power in the ward. The first thing that McMurphy does when he is placed in the ward is to introduce himself to every patient. This unusual behavior allows McMurphy to gain the trust of the other men. McMurphy helps to unite the men and works to become the leader. Through this turn of events, readers see the power struggle between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy begin. Nurse Ratched retains her power by hiding her...
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...nature to hope for the best in future situations and to always embellish our memories of the past. I think that this is our way of coping with the present. If we can convince ourselves that things were better at one point and therefore will be better at some point, then the present never seems too awful. This being said, it came as a surprise to me that such a fundamental mannerism of humans drove me so near insane. Novel after novel, I found that the characters who I actively despised were the ones who pretended that their lives were always perfect in order to escape the present. Take Blanche DuBois, from A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. At one point in the play, Blanche cries, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” and pardon my informality, but I HATED her for saying so. If only she had faced reality for one measly minute, she would have been able to see that the only way to fix her situation was to fight her plagued present. If...
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...The Fog in Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, symbolises PTSD and other trauma that has caused Chief Bromden to be put into the ward. The fog makes it so he can escape from the real world, but it also suffocates him and frightens him. As the fog dissipates, it symbolises how his emotions changed throughout the novel, making him a stronger person both physically and mentally. Throughout the novel Chief Bromden feels as though he is falling into a fog, that he is convinced is being pumped into the ward. Progressively getting lighter and lighter until it does not affect Bromden anymore, Kesey used the idea of the fog to represent the change bromden experiences in the entirety of the novel. With its many symbolic uses during the novel the fog can be seen as many different things both supporting and keeping bromden away from his goals. In the novel, Kesey points to the fact that Chief Bromden was a soldier in World War II, and during his time in battle, they used fog to hide the troops when they were under attack or surveillance by the enemy, this memory is instilled in Chief’s mind, causing him to fall back into the fog whenever he feels frightened or violated. The fog is not truly there, although, he has come to believe...
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...In the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest By Ken Kesey, Randle McMurphy’s sanity is up for debate but it is clear that he has an antisocial personality disorder that attributes to his strange and curious actions he takes throughout the entire book...
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...Jazmariliz Perez ENL 336-01 6 November 2015 When reading a novel it is important to notice how the author chooses to have their characters stand out as their own kind of people. In Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” the characters all have their own way of expressing why they act the way they do. One character that stood out the most was of course the narrator and long-term patient in a psychiatric ward, Chief Bromden. In J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” the narrator and young teen Holden Caulfield is also someone who sticks out to readers as someone who wants us to figure him out. Throughout both novels we as readers get the opportunity to learn more about who Chief Bromden and Holden are and what makes them similar and different to each other. Kesey introduces us to Chief Bromden and takes us through his journey and his idea of what society and life is like through his mind and his crazy world. Because he is the narrator we know more about him than any of the characters do. We know that he pretends to be deaf and mute when 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....
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...The protagonist is usually the main character, the one that tells the story from memory, but in some instances, like in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the main character is simply the narrator. Bromden is sometimes hard to understand,“Chief Bromden narrates, however, in ways that continually confuse the reader until he comes to appreciate how the logic of storytelling characteristic of a native point of view can manipulate different modes of discourse” The real protagonist was Randle McMurphy. Throughout the story, Chief Bromden describes the ward to the reader, but this only classifies him as the narrator. Randle McMurphy, a main character that came to the ward after pleading insanity, teaches the men how to find themselves. He shows them that they aren’t crazy and they could leave the ward when they were all ready, another lesson McMurphy taught the men. Nurse Ratched, an evil women that intimidates and mistreats the men, runs...
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...Peace, by John Knowles, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, and the movie, Cool Hand Luke, include Christ Figures who positively alter the setting where they once existed. Commonly, a Christ Figure intentionally takes on suffering, such as Luke in Cool Hand Luke and McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Luke is a newly arrived inmate at a work prison who influences his fellow prisoners to fight against authority. Just like Luke, McMurphy is a newly admitted patient in a mental institute who influences the people around him to defy the authority...
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...Character: Chief Bromden (Chief Broom) is the narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Attending for over ten years, he is the longest patient to stay the psychiatric hospital in Oregon. Bromden’s hallucinations brought him into the ward, in which he also gets paranoid and bullied. Because of these hallucinations, he must be medicated. In the beginning of the novel, Bromden reveals how the other patients believe he is deaf and cannot speak, however he is not. In the first chapter, Bromden writes, “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” (Kesey 3). Bromden himself does not know if what he is seeing is true or not and lies to his inmates about his disabilities, proving how he is an unreliable narrator....
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...more than 450 million copies of the series and skyrocketed to over $7.7 billion in sales worldwide on screenplay. Yes, books are fascinating and we get emotionally involved with them, but once a great actor or actress is put into the film of a favorite book or the phenomenal directors and filmmakers are used, it’s game over. You can not put into words the emotional connection that is made when watching a film. While reading and watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the director Milos Forman brilliantly allows us to feel everything the patients are feeling by portraying them all differently while having one thing in common: insanity. The film is superior to the novel because...
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...Deliverable # 2 Ervin Goffman “Characteristics of Total Institutions” Vs. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” By: Eric Sawyer Option #1 We live in a world with many different types of institutions. Some might care for mental problems, not being able to care for yourself or being at age when you cannot. There are also institutions that are organized to protect the community to so called intentional dangers. Some of the concepts we have discussed in class go hand and hand with the social context of Goffman’s total institutions. I will discuss the concepts of how institutions might hurt or help and the different concepts we have discussed in class relating to Coffman’s “Characteristics of Total Institutions”. Something that I analyzed in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo Nest” is the false diagnosis of insanity. Mcmurphy’s sanity is symbolized through free spirit, positive laughter and just an over all around positive out look on life. In Coffman’s “Total Institutions”, it goes into “Adaption Alignments” and how this is a mortifying process of how inmates must adapt to the conditions that an institution might have such as privileges and consequences. Mcmurphy falls under the rebellious line, the characteristics that fall under this is how the inmate intentionally challenges institution by refusing to cooperate with staff in almost any way. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest, Mcmurphy demonstrates this in many ways, in the part were he broke two young ladies in the institution, or...
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...Kelly Haddix Eng Comp 2 Jason Elznic 04/25/2012 My essay will show how Marxism is portrayed within the two short stories, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and A Raisin in the Sun. The purpose of this essay is to explain the Marxism role within these two short stories. I will use an academic approach to accomplish this objective. The role of Marxism is portrayed within these two stories, and I will show how Marxism is portrayed and defined by comparing these two short stories. The similarities between the two stories are that both Walter and McMurphy are fighting against a society that is bent on repressing them. Walter with the white community, and McMurphy with the hospital staff at the mental institution, namely Nurse Ratched. Nurse Ratched represents the controlling party in the mental institution where as the white realtor Mr. Lindner represents the controlling party of the white housing community. According to Dictionary.com the definition of Marxism states that “society is basically the struggle between the social classes.” Randle McMurphy McMurphy showed signs of Marxism’s conflict theory, focusing on the struggles between the classes (nurses and patients).McMurphy violated the norms of society when he was charged with statutory rape and sanctions were imposed, sending him to prison. McMurphy creates a society amongst the patients at the mental institution, which largely affects the structure of the institution. His relationship with the other patients...
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...are ones who have gone over.” - Hunter S. Thompson. Explore the presentation of the troubled mind in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and the poetry of John Keats, with illuminating reference to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “The Edge” described by Hunter S. Thompson is, he says, unexplainable. What seems clear is that ‘the Edge’ is at the limit of the human mind. It can’t be explained, Thompson says, because the only people who ‘really know where it is’ are the ones who ‘have gone over’ it, those who have died or else never returned to ‘reality’ and ‘sanity’. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the poetry of John Keats, and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all describe, in differing ways, states of mind on ‘the Edge’. When they were first published, the contemporary reception to Keats’s poems and to Wuthering Heights was remarkably similar. Keats was described as writing ‘the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language’ , while Bronte’s novel (published under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell) was called ‘too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive’, and described as ‘wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable’ with characters who are ‘savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.’ These accusations of ‘uncouth’, ‘coarse’ and ‘disjointed’ writing suggest that both authors had already crossed one edge with their writing: the edge of what was considered acceptable or respectable literature. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wrote...
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...Springboard Activity One Quote from book and Warm-Up Students will read this quote on the smart board and answer the following questions: How do you feel about the nurse being a wolf? What do you think about people being wolfs in everyday life? "This world ... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?" He [Harding] lets go McMurphy's hand and leans back and crosses his legs, takes another long pull off the cigarette. He pulls the cigarette from his thin crack of a smile, and the laugh starts up again-eee-eee-eee, like a nail coming out of a plank. "Mr. McMurphy ... my friend ... I'm not a chicken, I'm a rabbit. The doctor is a rabbit. Cheswick there is a rabbit. Billy Bibbit is a rabbit. All of us in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees, hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don't misunderstand me, we're not in here because we are rabbits-we'd be rabbits wherever we were-we're all in here because we can't adjust...
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