One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey - Essay Example

The narration is direct and ambiguous at once. This characteristic is achieved by the use of Chief Bromden, a patient of schizophrenia at Oregon, victim of hallucinations and paranoia asylum, as the narrator. His hallucinations serve as metaphors symbolizing the society as a machine called the Combine that controls the behavior of all humans. As Bromden describes the events that consequently led to his freedom from both: the asylum and his mental perplexities, the story of the numbing of his senses and his falling into his schizophrenic state is revealed.

In all, throughout the course of the novel, Bromden’s attitude towards life and his surroundings changes in three ways. As his story is uncovered, we come to learn that Bromden, a half Indian American born to a White mother and a Black father, had been subject to two forces that had belittled his personality since childhood: racism and the powerlessness of his father before the Combine, i.e the mechanized system that Bromden believes robs people of humanity and turns them into half life creatures living like clock-work toys.

The result of this was his growing invisibility and his act of being unable to understand what happens around him, by feigning deafness. He himself assesses the reasons for his behavior and identifies that in truth he wasn’t the one to initiate it saying “. it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all” (Kesey 58). An incident that probably led to his perception of himself as nobody was when three government officials having come to pursue his father, who was chief of his Indian tribe, completely ignored his presence though he addressed them.

Similar happenings gradually robbed him of his ability to speak up and by the time he entered the hospital, he was able to convince people of his deafness and dumbness. Bromden’s schizophrenia was triggered by the tragic events of World War II when he first realized the extent of his powerlessness to help a fellow fighter in the battle field. His guilt at choosing to live at the expense of a friends’ life and the inability to compete with the suppressing forces that surrounded him finally led to his shutting up of himself away from society in order to preserve his sense of freedom.

The “fog” in his mind, a product of his illness, gives him refuge, a reason for powerlessness and giving up the fight. The hospital, under the control of Nurse Ratched, ensures that patients never recover from their fears of the outside world. Rather, they are cured by accepting their roles in the system the society wants to prevail. The modern society has become the most powerful force governing the actions of an individual in today’s world. It needs robots that are always in sync with the roles it assigns, leaving no space for expressions of individuality and spiritual vitality.

The highly controlled routines at the hospital and Ratched’s strict authority project a similar influence on the patients. This status quo is disrupted when someone is bold enough to question the authority as McMurphy, the new arrival in the Bromden’s ward does. His lively spirits, ability to enrage Ratched and defeat her in different ways allow the initiation of a process of self discovery in the other patients. As the events unfold, we see how Bromden himself recognizes his own voice and is forced out of the fog to see flaws in the system he has feared for so long.

He sees himself acting of his own accord as an outcome of discovery of his individuality. On an occasion when he has lifted his hand to vote against the nurse, he confesses that he hadn’t been forced by anything or anyone. “No. That’