One Flew over the Cuckoos Nesttt

Chief Bromden, a patient in an Oregon asylum who pretends to be deaf and dumb narrates Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In this book the ward’s supervisor, Nurse Ratched controls the patients. Constantly picking on them, she puts them down and crushes their self-esteem. Chief Bromden is one of her victims. Almost 7ft tall, he stays silent, in the shadows, in order to avoid Nurse Ratched’s torture. One day a new patient, Randall Patrick McMurphy shows up and overnight things change. Immediately he sees how unfairly the patients are treated, how they have been brainwashed by Big Nurse. Disgusted by what he sees, he decides to rebel. It is a constant power struggle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. Slowly McMurphy gains the support he needs from the other patients and together they challenge Big Nurse’s authority. Although McMurphy dies at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he ultimately triumphs over Big Nurse.

McMurphy looks for as much attention as possible when he first arrives on the ward. He introduces himself as a gambler to the patients. He tells Billy,

“I figure you see, buddy, to be sort of the gambling baron on this ward, I deal a wicked game of blackjack. So you better take me to your leader and we’ll get it straightened out who’s gonna be boss around here (pg 19).”

Right from the beginning McMurphy seems to be the risk taker and the liberal un-ruly kind of guy. All he wants at first is to gain power. He sees that is can be easy to control the patients at the ward because of their mental and physical strength. What really boosts his confidence to make change though is that he starts seeing the bad things that are going on in the ward. This makes Nurse Ratched feel threatened by McMurphy because she has never had a patient test her powers like that before. McMurphy notices one thing that the ward is missing and that is laughter.

McMurphy knows that Nurse Ratched sucked all the laughter out of her patients, and he goes about doing something to change that so we can bring some life into their mechanized world. He has already been pushing Big Nurse’s buttons and almost gets sent to Disturbed. McMurphy wasn’t sent there because Nurse said, "I don't believe it would... I believe if he were sent to Disturbed now it would be exactly what the patients expect. He would be a martyr to them." He isn’t stupid and knows if he keeps picking at Nurses power he can end up in Disturbed. He surprised everyone on the ward by waking up early and polishing the latrine until it sparkled. Big Nurse acts nothing of this change of behavior because she doesn’t want to give her power up. Here, we have a structure in which McMurphy sets the rules of disruption, which are then built upon by Nurse Ratched when she chooses not to fulfill her responsibilities in terms of resolving that disruption, built upon again by McMurphy choosing to voluntarily resolve the disruption he caused, built upon once more by Nurse Ratched not acknowledging this resolution. "he dealt and talked and roped [the men] in and led them smack up to the point where they were just about to quit, then [he] backed down a hand or two to give them confidence and bring them along again." The power belongs to McMurphy, and Nurse Ratched is his pawn no matter what she does.

Nurse Ratched does not care why certain rules have been established. Her excuse for every rule is that it is simply for the therapeutic benefit of the patients. Instead she cares only that certain rules have been established, and must be abided by. This brings conflict with the rescheduling