Discuss the presentation of McMurphy in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and Offred in "The Handmaid's Tale" in their response to an authoritarian and oppressive environment.

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Sophie Anderton

Discuss the presentation of McMurphy in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” and Offred in “The Handmaid’s Tale” in their response to an authoritarian and oppressive environment.

        One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962, is the formation of both the personal experiences of its author, Ken Kesey, and the specific culture in which it was written. Kesey developed the novel while he attended Stanford University as a graduate student. The novel was partially inspired by Kesey's part-time job as an orderly in a Palo Alto veterans' hospital. It was also as a student where Kesey began participating in experiments that involved the use of LSD. This use of LSD provoked Kesey to have hallucinations while working as an orderly. Kesey hallucinated seeing a large Indian mopping the floors of the hospital; this hallucination prompted Kesey to add the character Chief Bromden as the novel's narrator. The novel in some sense forms a bridge between the bohemian beatnik movements of the 1950s and the 1960s counterculture movement. Kesey was significantly inspired by the beatnik culture around Stanford, and in the novel Kesey deals with a number of themes that would be significant in the counterculture movement, including ideas of freedom from repressive authority and a more liberated view of sexuality. Kesey himself became a highly influential counterculture figure as part of the Merry Pranksters a group of people in that movement. Similarly Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in the mid 1980’s, the novel was soon published in 1986 labelled as a science fiction. The Handmaid’s Tale falls squarely within the twentieth century tradition of dystopian novels, unlike that of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Atwood attempts to imagine what kind of values might develop if environmental pollution rendered most of the human race sterile. It also the product of debates within the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s and offers a very strong feminist vision of dystopia. She wrote it shortly after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, the period of conservative revival partly fuelled by a strong, well organised movement of religious conservatives who criticized what they perceived as the extremes of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. Atwood explores the consequences of a reversal of women’s rights; this is seen in the novel when sexual revolution is turned on its head. Feminist’s argued for liberation from traditional gender roles, but Gilead is the opposite of this, it is a return to tradition. What feminists considered the great triumphs of the 70s namely, extensive access to contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the increasing political influence of female voters has all be undone in Gilead.

        The authors present the main protagonist in both novels, and their response to their own authoritarian and oppressive environments very differently. The narrative viewpoints are of great importance as it is the way in which the author’s present their characters and they’re environment in the novel and how the reader perceives them. In the novel One Flew Over… Kesey’s decision to tell the story from the character Chief Bromden perspective shows his ostensibly random and irrational hallucinations, we question his reliability, we are reminded of his psychological disorder, confusing at first, but then gaining clarity we see that in fact they are carefully organised to give us an understanding of the hospital environment we would never receive from a more traditional narrator, such as the Offred in Handmaid’s Tale where Atwood uses first person narration  for the majority of the novel. This is a valuable technique as it enables the reader to identify with the main protagonist and engages our sympathies for her; this view makes the central character three dimensional and believable. Offred’s position within the society of Gilead allows her direct access to a range of situations that would not be probable from the view point of any other character, We can see the domestic arrangements in the society as well as her relationship with Ofglen and the Commander. However Chief Bromden’s position in the hospital hierarchy and his deaf and dumb charade allows him to present McMurphy with less restraint. Like Offred he is presented as a person of very little importance other than the purely functional roles.

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        There are however shortcomings to this viewpoint and Atwood makes good use of these, what we read is filtered through one person’s perspective and coloured with that person’s biases and beliefs, we have interpret the bigger picture from the one sided view. These factors are compounded by the nature of the society Atwood has created and the personality Offred herself. Atwood makes the form of Handmaid’s Tale in a personal memoir, Offred is free to reveal all she wants, but she is very opinionated and judgemental, she doesn’t choose to take risks to change her life. This sheds light over ...

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