Bromden’s paranoia is often justified, as the patients are indeed treated barbarically. But his hallucinations, though they seem crazy at first, metaphorically reveal his deep, intuitive understanding of his surroundings. For example, the fog machine he hallucinates represents his state of mind—he is overmedicated or simply too fearful to face the stark reality beyond the fog. The fog machine also represents the powerlessness of the patients, who are encouraged and sometimes forced by the staff to stay hidden in their own individual fogs.
In portraying McMurphy's struggles on the Acute/Chronic Ward, Kesey questions his society's definitions of sanity, which seem to ask all people to conform to the same standards of behaviour. When McMurphy discovers that many of the Acutes are at the hospital voluntarily, he wants to know why: “You, you're not exactly the everyday man on the street, but you're not nuts.” Billy Bibbit replies that they don't have the “guts” to get along in outside society, but ironically, Nurse Ratched's methods are designed to undermine the men's confidence, not encourage it. In this way, Kesey portrays his society's definition of “madness” as something used by an authoritarian culture to dehumanize the individual and replace it with an automaton that dwells in a safe, blind conformity. His hero, McMurphy, is the person who sees through this sham. By showing his fellow patients how to create their own standards of sanity, McMurphy leads a bunch of institutionalized robots back towards their humanity. In the process, he suffers greatly and in fact lays down his life. I think that although imprisonment is presented through all of these institutionalised men, Mcmurphy shows that society can be undermined by not conforming, I would argue that this is portrayed through Nurse Ratched who restricts and dehumanizes the boys.
The portrayals of the inmates of the institution, for the most part, are real and believable. Some are modelled on patients Kesey observed while doing night supervisory duty on a mental ward. For instance, the behaviour of George Sorenson, known as “Rub-a-Dub,” who is so concerned about cleanliness he won't touch anyone, is an example of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Especially moving is Chief's slow awakening to a validation of himself as a person, after experiencing years of racial slurs and physical degradation. The novel's portrayal of female and African American characters, however, is more problematic. Women are either control freaks who emasculate the men around them, such as Nurse Ratched, Vera Harding, and Billy Bibbit's mother, or objects for sexual gratification, such as the two hookers Candy and Sandy. The “black boys” Chief describes are alternately servile to their boss, Nurse Ratched, and cruel to the patients, showing no emotion but hatred. While Mr. Turkle's character is more sympathetic, he too is portrayed as fearful of authority and responsibility. While broad stereotypes such as these serve a purpose in creating a satire such as Cuckoo's Nest, they have still led to accusations of sexism and racism.
Bromden’s way of interpreting the world emphasizes the oppressive social pressure to conform: those who do not conform to society’s rules and conventions are considered defective products and are labelled mentally ill and sent for treatment. Thus, the mental hospital is a metaphor for the oppression Kesey sees in modern society, preceding the emergence of the 1960s counterculture. A hospital, normally a place where the ill go to be cured, becomes a dangerous place; Ellis, Ruckly, and Taber, for instance, are electro shocked until they become docile or even vegetables. The hospital is not about healing, but about dehumanizing and manipulating the patients until they are weak and willing to conform.
Both the narrators are imprisoned individuals of the society they live in. I think the opening chapters of each novel are easily comparable. For example, through the author’s use of language we as readers can examine the inner and outer lives of both of our narrators.
‘I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.’
We are given this brainteaser from Chief Bromden in Part I. The reader has already gotten a glimpse of Bromden’s paranoia, from the novel’s opening lines, as well as a sense that he is not seeing things from an everyday perspective. For example, Bromden describes Nurse Ratched transforming into a huge machine, and he has to be sedated when the aides try to shave him and he starts screaming “Air Raid.” Up until this point he has not addressed the reader directly; it is as though we are overhearing his private thoughts. But in this passage he asserts himself as not only the narrator but the author of the story. We learn here that he has an important story to tell, even though it is going to be difficult. The ugly and violent images that he has already shown us, he warns us, are just a taste of what is to come.
The last line of the quote is Bromden’s request that the reader keep an open mind. His hallucinations provide metaphorical insight into the hidden realities of the hospital and should not be overlooked simply because they did not actually happen. Although over the course of the novel Bromden regains his sanity, he still witnesses many of the events while in a semi-catatonic, hallucinatory state; we have to trust in the truth of his sharp perceptions, no matter what form they take.
Similarly in the opening chapter of the Bell Jar we see Esther use language to convey her feelings of entrapment.
‘…Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus…’
This quotation, which concludes the first section of Chapter 1, describes the disconnect Esther feels between the way other people view her life and the way she experiences her life. By all external measures, Esther should feel happy and excited. She has overcome her middle-class, small town background with luck, talent, and hard work, and her reward is a glamorous month in New York. Although she recognizes these objective facts, Esther feels uncertain both about her own abilities and about the rewards that these abilities have garnered her. To her own puzzlement, she does not find New York thrilling and romantic. Instead, she finds it dizzying and depressing, and she finds the fashion world she inhabits superficial and disorienting. The feeling of numbness that Esther describes here is the kernel of the madness that will soon overtake her. Eventually, the gap between societal expectations and her own feelings and experiences becomes so large that she feels she can no longer survive.
I think the stream of consciousness and the issue of reliability is an important factor in discussing the imprisonment of the narrators. I think the flashbacks which illuminate the characters illustrate the emotions of both narrators and show the realness of their stories. Bromden has numerous nightmares and I think nightmares are part of our personality, of our own individual truths. ‘Lot like the sound you hear when you’re standing late at night on top of a big hydroelectric dam.’ This shows Bromden’s displaced Indian background and almost seems surreal, hinting that Bromden had a more natural previous life. Bromden has his own truth, excisting in his own mind ‘But if they don’t excist, how can a man see them?’ Bromden’s attention to detail about his fishing trip on page one hundred and eleven, shows natural observation and his love towards fishing. A feeling of pathos and dignity is created during this paragraph as his life had changed significantly, as now he is trapped.
The relationship between both of the protagonists and their parents I think is vital in conveying the characters. Mrs. Greenwood remains in the background of the novel, for Esther makes little attempt to describe her. However, despite her relative invisibility, Mrs. Greenwood’s influence pervades Esther’s mind. Mrs. Greenwood subscribes to society’s notions about women. She sends Esther an article emphasizing the importance of guarding one’s virginity, and while she encourages Esther to pursue her ambition to write, she also encourages her to learn shorthand so that she can find work as a secretary. While Esther worries that her desire to be a poet or a professor will conflict with her probable role as wife and mother, her mother hopes that Esther’s ambitions will not interfere with her domestic duties.
Mrs. Greenwood clearly loves Esther and worries about her: she runs through her money paying for Esther’s stay in the hospital, and brings Esther roses on her birthday. Still, Esther partly faults her mother for her madness, and Plath represents this assigning of blame as an important breakthrough for Esther. When Esther tells Dr. Nolan that she hates her mother, Nolan reacts with satisfaction, as if this admission explains Esther’s condition and marks an important step in her recovery. The doctors decide that Esther should stay in the hospital until winter term at college begins rather than go home to live with her mother. Perhaps Esther hates her mother partly because she feels guilty about inflicting such vast pain on her.
On the other hand only tiny snippets of Bromden’s previous life are encaptured in the book. His ‘Papa’ is rarely mentioned. The reason for Bromden’s hospitalization is cloaked in ambiguity. He may have had a breakdown from witnessing the decline of his father or from the horrors of fighting in World War II. ‘You were safe from the enemy but you were awful alone.’ Both of these possible scenarios involve an emasculating and controlling authority—in the first case the government officials, in the second the army. These authority figures provide Bromden with fodder for his dark vision of society as an oppressive conglomeration that he calls the Combine. It is also possible that, like McMurphy, Bromden was sane when he entered the hospital but that his sanity slipped when he received what is rumoured to be 200 electroshock treatments. The paranoia and hallucinations he suffers from, which centre on hidden machines in the hospital that physically and psychologically control the patients can be read as metaphors for the dehumanization he has experienced in his life.
Esther’s sense of alienation from the world around her I think, comes from the expectations placed upon her as a young woman living in 1950s America. Esther feels pulled between her desire to write and the pressure she feels to settle down and start a family. While Esther’s intellectual talents earn her prizes, scholarships, and respect, many people assume that she most wants to become a wife and mother. The girls at her college mock her studiousness and only show her respect when she begins dating a handsome and well-liked boy. Her relationship with Buddy earns her mother’s approval, and everyone expects Esther to marry him. Buddy assumes that Esther will drop her poetic ambitions as soon as she becomes a mother, and Esther also assumes that she cannot be both mother and poet.
Esther longs to have adventures that society denies her, particularly sexual adventures. She decides to reject Buddy for good when she realizes he represents a sexual double standard. He has an affair with a waitress while dating Esther, but expects Esther to remain a virgin until she marries him. Esther understands her first sexual experience as a crucial step toward independence and adulthood, but she seeks this experience not for her own pleasure but rather to relieve herself of her burdensome virginity. Esther feels anxiety about her future because she can see only mutually exclusive choices: virgin or whore, submissive married woman or successful but lonely career woman. She dreams of a larger life, but the stress even of dreaming such a thing worsens her madness.
They go skiing, and Buddy tries to help her, even though Esther thinks that what he suggests is foolhardy. But, having suicidal thoughts, she decides to try to go down a big hill even though she doesn't know how to zigzag. She seems easily influenced to self-destructiveness. Thus she flies to the bottom of the hill and is "doing fine until the man stepped into her path." She breaks her leg in two places and believes that Buddy is really quite happy about it. Throughout the story, Esther is "doing fine" until something or someone—a man usually—steps in her path. Then things go awry, and she always ends up as a crumpled mess. In college, the chemistry class stepped in her path, and in New York City, violent sex stepped into the crowded streets in the guise of Lenny. Later, when Esther goes home, we discover that the letter of non-acceptance for the male instructor's writing course had arrived; this letter ruins Esther's summer plans. We recall, then, when Esther was nine: her father died unexpectedly, ruining her idyllic life. Esther seems bent on rushing towards her projected goals, and she doesn't know what to do when the plans are changed, especially when they are changed by a force outside her, usually a man. Thus Esther feels entrapped by other people enforcing her t do things against her own will.
‘Man has but one truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter.’
This passage occurs later in the same discussion that followed McMurphy’s first Group Meeting in Part I. Here, Kesey begins to develop his misogynistic theory about modern society. Harding is talking to McMurphy, explaining that men’s one weapon against women is the penis, and that if men are unable to use rape effectively, they have no chance to regain power in society. Kesey believes that women have learned this, and they now know how to render men’s one weapon useless—in other words, they are all ball-cutters. Where rape is the male means to power, castration is the female way to domination.
These crude ideas are given substance throughout the novel. Kesey uses McMurphy’s fearless sexuality as a sign that he is sane. McMurphy goads Ratched sexually by wearing just a towel, pinching her rear, remarking on her breasts, and eventually tearing her shirt open. Most of the male patients have stories about damaging relationships with women, such as Bromden’s mother, Billy Bibbit’s mother and onetime girlfriend, and Harding’s wife. When McMurphy notices Bromden’s erection, a sign that he is “getting bigger already,” it signifies that Bromden is becoming more powerful and saner. Similarly, through sex with Candy, Billy briefly regains his confidence and his manhood, until Ratched takes it away and he commits suicide. Moreover, Ratched and the hospital supervisor, also a woman, wield all the power in the hospital: “We are victims of a matriarchy here,” says Harding.
The Bell Jar takes a critical view of the medical profession, in particular psychiatric medicine. This critique begins with Esther’s visit to Buddy’s medical school. There, Esther is troubled by the arrogance of the doctors and their lack of sympathy for the pain suffered by a woman in labour. When Esther meets her first psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon, she finds him self-satisfied and unsympathetic. He oppresses her and does not listen, prescribing a traumatic and unhelpful shock therapy treatment. Joan, Esther’s acquaintance in the mental hospital, tells a similar tale of the insensitivity of male psychiatrists. Some of the hospitals in which Esther stays are frighteningly sanitized and authoritarian. The novel does not paint an entirely negative picture of psychiatric care, however. When Esther goes to a more enlightened, luxurious institution, she begins to heal under the care of Dr. Nolan, a progressive female psychiatrist. The three methods of 1950s psychiatric treatment—talk therapy, insulin injections, and electroshock therapy—work for Esther under the proper and attentive care of Dr. Nolan. Even properly administered therapy does not receive unmitigated praise, however. Shock therapy, for example, works by clearing the mind entirely. After one treatment, Esther finds herself unable to think about knives. This inability comes as a relief, but it also suggests that the therapy works by the dubious method of blunting Esther’s sharp intelligence.
Similarly, the electric shock treatment represents oppression from Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The electroshock therapy table is explicitly associated with crucifixion. It is shaped like a cross, with straps across the wrists and over the head. Moreover, the table performs a function similar to the public crucifixions of Roman times. McMurphy increasingly becomes identified with Christ, from the crucifixion on the electroshock therapy table preceded by the patient “washing his hands of the whole affair” to the echoes of the Last Supper when Billy Bibbit engages in sexual relations with Candy Starr. Like Christ, McMurphy sacrifices himself for the benefit of the group, and in doing so, he loses his free will.
Plath uses characters such as buddy Willard, using a clever writing technique to show his relationship with others, how people viewed him, his actions and physical description
‘To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.’
This quotation comes from the last chapter of the Bell Jar, in which Esther attempts to draw some conclusions about the experiences she has undergone. Her mother suggests that they treat Esther’s madness as if it were a bad dream that can be forgotten. This quotation records Esther’s inward response; she feels that madness is like being trapped in a bad dream, but it is a bad dream from which one cannot awake. Esther likens the person who suffers from mental illness to the pickled foetuses she saw at Buddy’s medical school, a morbid connection that illustrates the terror of madness.
In conclusion,