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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 1

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Page 1: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest analysis part 2

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.

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Page 2: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest analysis part 2

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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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

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