Jamba Juice
... the sorts of rational explanations we're used to hearing. It's he who tells McMurphy how Nurse Ratched is able to maintain her power, how electroshock therapy works, what a lobotomy does to people. He helps the new patients and the reader understand the matriarchy directed by Nurse Ratched. C. Brief Summary— One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest takes place in a mental institution in the Pacific Northwest. The narrator of the novel is Chief Bromden, also known as Chief Broom, a catatonic half-Indian man whom everybody thinks is deaf and dumb. He often suffers from hallucinations in which he feels that the room is filled with fog. The institution is dominated by Nurse Ratched (Big Nurse), a cold, precise woman with calculated gestures and a calm, mechanical manner. When the story begins, a new patient, Randall Patrick McMurphy, arrives at the ward. He is a self-professed 'gambling fool' who has just come from a work farm at Pendleton. He introduces himself to the other men on the ward, including Dale Harding, the president of the patient's council, and Billy Bibbit, a thirty-year old man who stutters and appears very young. Nurse Ratched immediately pegs McMurphy as a manipulator. The patients in the mental ward are cowed and repressed by the emasculating Nurse Ratched, who represents the oppressive force of modern society. McMurphy tries to lead them to rebel against her authority by asserting their individuality and sexuality, while Nurse Ratched attempts to discredit McMurphy and shame the patients back into docility. In the end, McMurphy’s radical attitude and contagious personality forever transform the men of the ward, but at a price. In a last attempt to regain power, the Big Nurse performs a lobotomy on McMurphy, leaving him basically as a emotionless Vegetable. Chief Bromden, the patient most empowered by McMurphy, smothers him to death out of an act of love for the patients not to see their hero fallen, and for McMurphy not to have to live this way forever. Now a new man, Bromden breaks free from the hospital and runs away, free from the “combine” to become a member of society once more. III. Key Elements A. Themes/Morals 1. The defiance of authority, anti-establishment, freedom from oppression. An example of that mode of American fiction which focuses on massive conspiracy by a society that has become an intimidating force for consumerism and conformity called a ‘Combine’. They emerge from the modernist tradition which was responding to disturbing changes in an increasingly urban and militaristic world. Nurse Ratched, as the dictator of the ward and the patients as her helpless followers. McMurphy is the revolution. This represents a society in which the internal policies reflects the way the external world rules. 2. The novel in some sense forms a bridge between the bohemian beatnik movements in the 1950s and the 1960s counterculture movement, both of which Kesey was an active participant of. Kesey deals with a number of themes that would be significant in the counterculture movement, including notions of freedom from repressive authority and more liberated view of sexuality. 3. The latter theme in the novel - the entire work is imbued with the ancient battle of the sexes . Nurse Ratched uses the repression of the men’s sexuality as a crucial weapon to remain in control. Leslie Horst, a psychologist and an expert in women’s studies, feels that...