Addressing the Needs of the Cuckoos Nest - Essay Example

Addressing the Needs of the Cuckoo's Nest Life doesn't always work out the way we've planned and sometimes even master manipulators get caught in their own trap. This would seem to be the case for Randy McMurphy in Ken Kesey's story One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The story is about a fictional psychiatric hospital located somewhere in Oregon and opens just before Randy McMurphy is brought in. The narrator of the story is a large man - half Indian - who pretends he is deaf and dumb in order to avoid being forced into what he calls the machine by which he is referring to the organized governmental system that the hospital staff represents. Originally entering the ward in a bid to escape having to serve jail time, McMurphy quickly sizes up the other patients and determines what each can do to help make his stay in the ward more comfortable and exciting. However, as he comes into direct conflict with the high level of manipulation and oppression directed through the heavy hand of Big Nurse Ratched, the Irishman's energy and focus becomes a driving need to thwart her efforts. Since it appears that Nurse Ratched's primary goal is to keep the patients on the ward completely subdued and under her control, McMurphy concentrates on helping them recover their own sense of power and independence. As he constantly challenges Nurse Ratched's authority and demonstrates to the men on the ward that they have their own inner power to defy her wishes, McMurphy reveals to the men various ways in which they can help themselves break out of the mental traps in which they'd allowed themselves to be trapped. Although he didn't set out to empower the patients or to play any role positive or negative in their rehabilitation, it can be argued that Randy McMurphy was more successful than Nurse Ratched in rehabilitating the patients. By comparing Nurse Ratched's approach to the patients with McMurphy's approach, it is easy to see that even though both characters lost something important to them, McMurphy was more successful in helping these patients rehabilitate. It is clear from the beginning of the book that Nurse Ratched's primary goal is to ensure all the people within her domain are completely subjugated to her command so that she can 'fix' them the way she sees fit. Her purpose in working with the patients is to break them down until they are completely submissive to her instructions and desires. These desires are that the patients be fixed to work like the well-oiled machine they were intended to be, which the narrator makes clear right away in his description of the tools of her trade that she carries in her handbag: "there's no compact or lipstick or woman stuff, she's got that bag full of a thousand parts she aims to use in her duties today - wheels and gears, cogs polished to a hard glitter, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers pliers, rolls of copper wire ... " (10). The tools of her trade are the tools of a mechanic intent on putting broken machines back together. There is no sense that she values the human spirit that ignites each soul as she works to break down the patients' resistance so that she can organize their universe for them. "The Big Nurse tends to get real put out if something keeps her outfit from running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine ... what she dreams of there in those wires is a world of precision efficiency and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back" (30). This concept of the patient as a broken clock continues to be mentioned by the narrator, Chief Bromden, who illustrates the fear and mistrust the other men have of her motives. She appears in her description like a giant mechanical spider sitting “in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend[s] her network with mechanical insect skill, know[s] every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants” (30). Whether or not she is truly intent on helping these men heal within the limits of her understanding, Nurse Ratched is quickly understood to be an oppressive tyrant who's method is clearly to break the men into their component parts so that she can force them to behave more effectively as the puppet men they 'should' be in order to properly contribute to the mind-numbing capitalist society that was encroaching on society. She does this to such an extent that Chief Bromden has come to think of the hospital as the 'shop' where men go to be fixed into the cogs and wheels they are supposed to be for the greater efficiency of the larger machine that was the nation. "The shop symbolizes the hidden oppression operating in the outside world. The patients are broken-down machines that the asylum seeks to adjust. The Big Nurse’s basic method is to destroy the patients’ self-confidence by making them admit their guilt, shame, and uselessness" (Macky). Only once their spirits are completely broken and subdued can they be remade into the image they were supposed to be and gain their independence from the hospital, but not from the machine itself. McMurphy is also using the patients in the ward as a means of serving his own internal desires and need for control, but his method is to encourage the patients to resist the machine. As the story opens, it is quite clear that McMurphy successfully faked an insanity plea simply as a means of escaping the hard work he'd heard about at the Pendleton Work Farm in order to achieve what he perceived as the easier time served at the mental hospital. This idea is expressed as McMurphy interviews with the ward doctor in front of many of the other patients. He asks the doctor a seemingly innocent question that nevertheless is designed to establish him as a hero to the other patients, "where it says 'Mr. McMurphy has evidenced repeated ... outbreaks of passion that suggest the possible diagnosis of psycopath.' He told me that 'psychopath' means I fight and fuh - pardon me, ladies - means I am he put it overzealous in my sexual relations. Doctor, is that real serious?" (46). But the doctor responds by asking him about the comment another doctor wrote in his file: “Don’t overlook the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis to escape the drudgery of the work farm” (46), pointing out that he sees through McMurphy's attempt to position himself as a big man on the ward. McMurphy's need to escape from the hospital setting after he discovers Big Nurse's control of the ward finally drives him to offer real help to the other patients, mostly as a means of helping McMurphy overcome his situation. One example of this occurs when he makes a deal with Chief Bromden to use his strength to break out: “I want to know can you promise to lift it if I get you as big as you used to be? You promise me that, and you not only get my special body-buildin’ course for nothing, but you get yourself a ten buck fishing trip free!” (Kesey, 1962). McMurphy's primary purpose is simply to foil Nurse Ratched in her attempts to subdue him. As he engages in this campaign of resistance, he reminds the other men on the ward what it's like to feel more fully human, more in control of your own thoughts and feelings. He even tries to inject a little backbone into the ward doctor as he consistently tries to get the doctor to make a decision that will affect the ward: "Doc, tell 'em what you come up with about the hard-of-hearing guys and the radio" (98). As the nurse continues to hold her grip on the ward, McMurphy begins to actively plot to escape her, but he requires the help of the other men to do it. "Everything that McMurphy has done for the men up to then has been to his financial advantage. For the largest part of the novel McMurphy is a con man, just as Big Nurse claims" (Foster, 2002). However, in getting the men to do what he wants them to do to achieve his own freedom, McMurphy offers them something they want or need in exchange. This has the effect of empowering the men, forcing them to realize that they have given up everything that made them human and have received nothing, not even the respect due them as human beings, in return. As he becomes more aware of the real conditions within the ward and the relative sanity of some of the subdued Acutes, he takes a more active role in empowering them toward freedom. Although both Nurse Ratched and McMurphy are successful in their efforts at differing times as they struggle back and forth for control of the patients, neither one is able to win much for themselves in the end. McMurphy is considered to be more successful because he has proven to the other men on the ward that Nurse Ratched is simply manipulating their insecurities as a means of more effectively controlling them. He destroys Nurse Ratched’s rigid control by giving the men a sense of independence, but he is unable to achieve independence for himself. His greatest success in terms of waking the other men out of their stupor comes when he reveals Nurse Ratched’s breasts and thus her own frail humanity to the other men: “screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out” (267). As part of his attack, McMurphy strangled Nurse Ratched so severely that she lost the use of her voice, being reduced to communicating through notes and thus lost her power of command through the sharp tones and biting comments that once caused the men to jump with such fright. At the same time, no matter what she did, Nurse Ratched had lost the frightening mystique of her earlier authority: "in spite of its being smaller and tighter and more starched than her old uniforms, it could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman" (268). McMurphy's success was not only to remove Nurse Ratched from the control center of these men's lives, but to enable these men to take new control over what happened to them. "Sefelt and Frederickson signed out together Against Medical Advice, and two days later another three Acutes left, and six more transferred to another ward" (268) while Bromden makes it clear that his continued presence on the ward was a simple matter of choice. "I didn't want to leave just yet, because she seemed to be too sure; she seemed to be waiting for one more round, and I wanted to be there in case it came off" (269). This moment of McMurphy's greatest success in empowering the other men is also the moment of his personal defeat as Nurse Ratched achieves her revenge. McMurphy returns to the ward on a gurney after having been given a lobotomy, transformed into a living vegetable incapable of any form of self-control. Rather than allow McMurphy's living body to remain on the ward as a testament to Nurse Ratched's returning power, Chief Bromden suffocates him with a pillow before escaping himself into the night. Although he loses his life in the exchange, McMurphy wins in his contest against Nurse Ratched because he succeeds where she has failed. By adopting an approach intended to geve the men confidence in themselves and making them aware that their own thoughts and desires should be taken into consideration, McMurphy empowers them which is the first step toward their rehabilitation. Nurse Ratched's approach is designed to break them down first, remove any resistance to her influences and then, when she gets around to it, to build them back up into the perfect automatons she expects them to be to take their proper places within the greater mechanized society. Bromden waits around just long enough after the lobotomy to gain access to McMurphy's vegetative body. By suffocating him in the middle of the night, Bromden removes Nurse Ratched's last symbol of control: “I was only sure of one thing: he wouldn’t have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system” (270). Although the men who would have known of what McMurphy had lost have either transferred out of the ward or are dead at this point in the story, Bromden still remembers McMurphy's example and the positive effect he had in helping them gain their sense of selves. Works Cited Foster, John Wilson. "Hustling to Some Purpose: Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'" Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations. 2002: 67-78. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Signet, 1962. Macky, Peter W. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Masterplots. 4th edition. Nov. 2010: 1-3. Read More