Compare and contrast the way imprisonment is presented in The Bell Jar and One Flew over The Cuckoo's Nest

Authors Avatar

Compare the ways in which imprisonment is presented in The Bell Jar and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Both of these books are ‘products of both the personal experiences of the author…and the specific culture in which they were written.’ Thus both reflect on the gender roles during the 1950’s and the struggle the protagonists had to endure in a struggling society. Ken Kesey, the younger of two sons, was born in on September 17, 1935 in La Junta, Colorado. While at Stanford, he participated in experience involving chemicals at the psychology department to earn extra money. These chemicals included psilocybin, mescaline and LSD. It was this experience that fundamentally altered Kesey, personally and professionally. While working as an orderly at the psychiatric ward of the local VA hospital, Kesey began to have hallucinations about an Indian sweeping the floors. This formed the basis for 'Chief Broom' in . Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. In 1953, Sylvia returned home to her Boston suburb after working at a fashion magazine internship, where she made her first suicide attempt and was hospitalized for psychotherapy; these events, among other biographical details, are paralleled in . 

One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest explores the themes of individuality and rebellion against conformity, ideas that were widely discussed at a time when the United States was committed to opposing communism and totalitarian regimes around the world. However, Kesey’s approach, directing criticism at American institutions themselves, was revolutionary in a way that would find greater expression during the sixties.  Sylvia Plath’s literary persona has always provoked extreme reactions. Onlookers tend to mythologize Plath either as a feminist martyr or a tragic heroine. The feminist martyr version of her life holds that Plath was driven over the edge by her misogynist husband, and sacrificed on the altar of pre-feminist, repressive 1950s America. The tragic heroine version of her life casts Plath as a talented but doomed young woman, unable to deal with the pressures of society because of her debilitating mental illness. Although neither myth presents a wholly accurate picture, truth exists in both. The Bell Jar does not label its protagonist’s life as either martyred or heroic. Plath does not attribute Esther’s instability to men, society, or Esther herself, although she does criticize all three. Rather, she blames mental illness, which she characterizes as a mysterious and horrific disease.

The narrative technique used in The Bell Jar is a first person narrative. Straight away we get the idea of imprisonment through elements of the unhappy narrative voice in the early chapters. The first sentence of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar alerts the reader to the conflicts that will be dealt with in this semi-autobiographical novel: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenberg’s, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." The speaker will tell us in the next few sentences that she is "stupid" and that she feels "sick," and that she is preoccupied with death. When Esther Greenwood tells us in the first sentence that this is "the summer they electrocuted the Rosenberg’s," we get a picture not only of that summer's being nauseating, sultry, and death-oriented, but that this young girl's attitudes and life experiences are also this way.

Kesey seems to follow a fairly straightforward course in unfolding the plot of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Except for a few flashbacks and digressions, the story is essentially told from beginning to end. The first-person (“I”) narrator Chief Bromden, however, is a schizophrenic—a person prone to hallucinations and delusions. As a result, the reader is sometimes unsure whether some of the events he describes really happened or not. After all, Chief believes he sees small mechanical items inside the capsules of medicine he receives and believes that a machine is responsible for creating the “fog” that enfolds his perceptions. Having Chief as a narrator also adds to the development of the story, however, for told through his eyes, the story unfolds in part through Chief's changing emotional and intellectual state. After McMurphy leads the revolt over the World Series, for example, Chief notes that “there's no more fog any place,” implying that McMurphy is actually helping to bring sanity to the ward.

Join now!

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 ...

This is a preview of the whole essay