Power in Novels

Power is a great story line for many novels throughout the ages. Also power is a horrible life guide that many people live with throughout their lives. Within the novels One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Wuthering Heights, it is easy to recognize different cases of power and how power hungry individuals work. Nurse Ratched, featured in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, is a power obsessed middle-aged nurse who is the head of a mental institute and thrives off of the power she creates over the residents at the facility. Another version of power would be one of creating fear and a longing for revenge. In the novel Wuthering Heights, a, once orphan boy named Heathcliff fell in love with a young lady, which betrayed her and left him. He then felt compelled to spend the rest of his life seeking revenge.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is a novel that takes place in a mental institution in which head nurse Ratched is in charge of the men in the facility. Nurse Ratched is a cold hearted, almost robotic woman who runs the facility on a strict and sound schedule in which things never change. She has selected her staff for their submissiveness and willingness to abide by her every order in the ward. She even has a serene power over her superiors, in which she convinces them to withhold certain patients or let them go.

Nurse Ratched is a person who dehumanizes the people around her to malleable clay figures, in which she can manipulate at her will. She thrives for the power she has been given and only wishes to expand her power more and more over the institution. Not only over the men in the institute that are patients, but the staff as well must strictly amend to her rules and regulations. She maintains her power by the strategic use of shame and guilt. Wanting only for herself and thinking only for herself and the many ways to empower everyone around her.

Nurse Ratched, the all powerful is defeated though, despite all of her grand schemes and actions against a certain patient named Randal P. McMurphy. He is taken in by the institution and quickly picks up on Nurse Ratched's ways of overpowering the rest of the patients. He decides to then overpower her by tuning in to every weakness she may have and fights her totalitarian power in the institution. At the end of the novel he rips open Nurse Ratched's shirt to reveal the one feminine quality that she possesses. The only thing the men of the institution could relate her to as a woman, and she then loses and never regains the power she has taken so long to obtain.

Another version of power is the grotesque, stingy way that Heathcliff obtains his own power from no power in the novel Wuthering Heights. An orphan taken in by Mr. Earnshaw at the place named

Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff then grows up as a young boy to a man along side