Analysis Of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

SETTING
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest takes place in Oregon during the late 1950’s or early 1960’s in a mental hospital. We know this because the memory of World War II is fresh in Bromden’s and McMurphy’s minds. The environment is very grey, dull, confining, and machine-like. There is very little warmth before McMurphy’s arrival. The cold feeling of the hospital is Nurse Ratched’s tool. She creates this atmosphere to control the men in her ward. The setting of the book is important because it affects how the patients are treated and treat others.

DICTION
The diction is very informal and colloquial. Bromden has the grammar of someone uneducated: “...the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me (Kesey 8).” There is a lot of imagery and a lot of metaphors.The language is plain for the most part except when Bromden has hallucinations which are described very

Bromden’s comparison of the black boys to radios contributes to the idea of dehumanization. It also shows his hallucinatory tendencies and his fear of the staff at the hospital. There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at that visiting doctor talking with the residents. I can see him stabbing some point in the palm of his hand with his finger, but I can’t hear what he says because of the crash of the cold, frothy stream coming down out of the rocks. I can smell the snow in the wind where it blows down off the peaks. I can see mole burrows humping along under the grass and buffalo weed. It’s a real nice place to stretch your legs and take it easy (Kesey 126).
This passage creates an image very akin to what a reader could imagine Bromden came from. The descriptions are very nature focused. It also reinforces Bromden’s hallucinations of his home and the inevitability of Nurse Ratched’s