Literary Analysis Of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Abusing Power:
A Literary Theme Analysis of Part One in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Throughout the passage of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, from Kesey’s “Part One”, we come across our protagonist, Randle Patrick “Mac” McMurphy. He is the manipulator of the ward who fights against society’s demands as opposed to the oppressive Nurse Ratched “Big Nurse”, who controls the ward under her tyrannical rule. McMurphy is admitted into a mental institution in Salem, Oregon, claiming that he’s indeed a “psychopath”, which is all just an act to escape labor duties at the Pendleton Work Farm. After his arrival, he has certainly shifted the ward by encouraging the patients to rebel against the Nurse Ratched’s orders. He seeks to crack Nurse Ratched by testing her authority, but what he doesn’t realize is that she’s capable of using her power against him — by sending him to the Shock Shop. In order to keep her power intact, she manipulates her patients by “pecking” at their manhood during her Therapeutic Meetings or a “Pecking Party”, making them feel emasculated. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, we go over how Nurse Ratched abuses her

McMurphy explains how “they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers” (Kesey 57). Could the blood, bones, and feathers symbolizes the man’s masculinity and what makes them as a whole? Could the “rip to shreds” (Kesey 57) part symbolize how the men turn on eachother and making them feel emasculated? McMurphy describes the therapeutic meetings as a “peckin’ party”, that might be because the therapeutic meetings didn’t actually provide beneficial help rather than it made the men turn on eachother (peck at each other's