One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

Jake Potter

Mr.Boucher

English

Theme Essay

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Power is the theme of Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, who holds power, who doesn't, who wants it, who loses it, how it is used to scare and trick people and for what purposes, and, most especially, how it is disrupted and subverted, challenged, denied and assumed. On a deeper level, the theme reveals the ways in which an individual in pursuit of power will reduce any others who threaten that pursuit to the level, of the relationship shared between Nurse Ratched and her adversary, Randle Patrick McMurphy.

Before McMurphy arrives at the hospital, Nurse Ratched's routine worksin maintaining a sense of order. However, thisexists not in the hospital but only within the walls of Nurse Ratched's ward. Certainly the routine described by Bromden in the fourth chapter of part one is evidence enough each inmate is assigned a job and is to abide by Nurse Ratched's strict plans, and each inmate fulfills his duties without question and with hardly a mistake in that schedule until McMurphy arrives. And with McMurphy's disruptive mind entering the machine of the hospital, the conflict begins.

It is clear that Nurse Ratched holds power over the ward Harding tells McMurphy after McMurphy arrives. That they are living under a strict rules. She is the nurse and she is in charge and the inmates are simply objects in the machine, Acutes and Chronics, and she does not treat them as individual people. But that cannot be said of McMurphy and so hesets to work on taking Nurse Ratcheds power. Later Cheif remarks on McMurphys use of humor as a weapon against the ward. Nursae Ratched cannot play McMurphy's game. A suggestion goes around the ward that she will send McMurphy up to Disturbed but she changes the rules to reassert her power over the ward as a whole, and she leaves him be.

Although Nurse Ratched does eventually destroy McMurphy, her ways of doing so have less to do with the power and more to do with movible power; she beats him by way of an unfair advantage and the privilege

she achieves over him is only achieved by utilizing resources far beyond McMurphys grasp. As suchhe still keeeps his power over her even