Allegory In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

What would one expect if one's idea of society and normality was manipulated and engineered by someone else? This is the case in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The novel is articulated by Chief Bromden, a schizophrenic patient, and is set in an insane asylum with a strict tyrannical administrator, Nurse Ratched. The significance of “Big Nurse Ratched” is how she is considered to be the representative of society as she tries to mold everyone directly into her picture- perfect vision. Kesey used a collection of literary devices such as symbolism, situational irony, imagery, and analogy, to imply the central theme of the novel, the allegory to 1960's American Society.

As Ken Kesey initiates his novel, he adds a more visual description to further enhance the audience's’ view on the meeting’s “usual procedure” held by Nurse Ratched. He does so by using an analogy to compare the meeting to a “peckin’ party” since all the nurse does is point out imperfections as well as lower down the patient’s self-esteem in order to run according to her rules.

The combine or the controlled environment, is contrasted as an analogy for chief’s mental condition as he referred the asylum to be just an oppressive place ruled “… not [only] [by] the big nurse… but [by] the whole combine, the nation- wide combine….” (192) This allows a glimpse in the interconnection of his mind that provides his views on how things are managed in the mental institution. He has notably expressed that patients are taken in for treatment, but returned to be just a bundle of washed out individuals. Chief justifies that patients coming out of treatment are “just [more] robots being brought into the combine and will might as well be a failure,” (21) to signify that the frivolous treatments do nothing more than spit them out exactly how society wants them to