One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

4 Pages 1038 Words

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, raises the issue of social morality in that it pits the moral structure of one man against that of the mental institution that is his society. When Randle Patrick McMurphy arrived at the mental institution, he immediately set things on edge by mocking the staff policies and joking with the patients. His gregarious demeanor and cheerful attitude was in marked contrast to a ward full of men who are shy, frightened mice that can hardly chuckle, and who live in constant terror of the Big Nurse and her indirect attacks. Nurse Ratched is a firm believer in structure and she dehumanizes her patients for the sake of her own empowerment. McMurphy believes that they are human and deserving of rights and equal treatment. This fundamental difference in their moral structure is the basis of the conflict between McMurphy and a society represented by the Big Nurse.
By deliberately presenting himself as violently insane, R.P. McMurphy got himself out of the prison work farm and into what he thought would be an easy stint in an institution for mental illness. Over the course of his stay in the ward, McMurphy found that the patients were more robot-like than human in their actions and thoughts. The power that controlled them was the “Big Nurse,” Mrs. Ratched. One of the patients, Chief Bromden even says, “I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants” (pg. 30). The hospital was extremely structured. The patients daily lives were monotonous, they were perceived as brain-dead and were treated as such regardless of their true state of mental health. McMurphy felt that each patient was regarded as a “lab rat,” in that they were treated with unnecessary procedures and giv...