Ken Kesey's tragicomic novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, takes place in a mental hospital during the late 1950s. Kesey celebrates the role of the individual and the power he yields, to fight against a prevailing system, even though the individual is defeated. Kesey has effectively portrayed the power though McMurphy and Chief. They both challenge the mechanised institution with the help of other secondary characters.
McMurphy is the only one that comes into the ward as an individual. Chief sees describes him as being different from all other usual admission “I don’t hear him slide...he already plenty damn clean. Thank You.” He introduces himself to everyone in the ward, shaking hands and filling the silence with loud laughter. Kesey celebrates him as the individual who is powerful, dynamic figure and one who can challenge the prevailing system. McMurphy immediately engages in a long, hopeless, and endless battle with Big Nurse, a classic control freak. She has control over the machinery that controls the ward. It is the machinery which de-humanises the other patients and makes them a mass and not individual. This is what McMurphy is to fight for, the freedom of the patients. What Nurse Ratched wants is a group of docile and quiet men who do not upset or question how she has ordered things. What McMurphy has brought to the ward is a touch of normalcy. . Therefore McMurphy is the ultimate threat — a nonconformist who stirs the residents into a desire for action. He wakes them up out of the dullness and quiet in which they have been dwelling. There are many examples in ways which McMurphy has changed the life of the other patients. The fishing trip is one example, it gives them all a chance to get out of the mechanised control of Nurse Ratched, and they all go against her, including the doctor. His energizing influence on the residents lives on, however. Several leave to go home after McMurphy's demise as their leader, and Chief Bromden escapes from the ward and heads for the country. Despite his final degradation to a vegetative state, he wins the fight for freedom that he has fought so bravely. But the rewards are not his.
