One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nesttt
...One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In this book the ward’s supervisor, Nurse Ratched controls the patients. Constantly picking on them, she puts them down and crushes their self-esteem. Chief Bromden is one of her victims. Almost 7ft tall, he stays silent, in the shadows, in order to avoid Nurse Ratched’s torture. One day a new patient, Randall Patrick McMurphy shows up and overnight things change. Immediately he sees how unfairly the patients are treated, how they have been brainwashed by Big Nurse. Disgusted by what he sees, he decides to rebel. It is a constant power struggle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. Slowly McMurphy gains the support he needs from the other patients and together they challenge Big Nurse’s authority. Although McMurphy dies at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he ultimately triumphs over Big Nurse.
McMurphy looks for as much attention as possible when he first arrives on the ward. He introduces himself as a gambler to the patients. He tells Billy,
“I figure you see, buddy, to be sort of the gambling baron on this ward, I deal a wicked game of blackjack. So you better take me to your leader and we’ll get it straightened out who’s gonna be boss around here (pg 19).”
Right from the beginning McMurphy seems to be the risk taker and the liberal un-ruly kind of guy. All he wants at first is to gain power. He sees that is can be easy to control the patients at the ward because of their mental and physical strength. What really boosts his confidence to make change though is that he starts seeing the bad things that are going on in the ward. This makes Nurse Ratched feel threatened by McMurphy because she has never had a patient test her powers like that before. McMurphy notices one thing that the ward is missing and that is laughter.
McMurphy knows that Nurse Ratched sucked all the laughter out of her patients, and he...
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