Chief Bromden Of A Mental Hospital example essay topic

In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kelsey, the narrative perspective given by Chief Bromden of a mental hospital is portrayed as something surreal. Metaphors are used to back up his concepts as well as machinery imagery. The Three black boys that methodically obey an irritated nurse with a cold heart are just part of the cast of characters that live in what resembles mostly a factory than a sanatorium. The "Fog Machine" is something that the staff gave to the patients for them to be quiet, as well as the machine noises described by the Chief. The Big Nurse, Miss Ratched is illustrated "as tense as steel" and instead of her carrying a normal purse like women do, she carries one with "wheels and gears, cogs polished hard to glitter, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers pliers, rolls of copper wire... ".

. Through diction, the reader discovers by seeing through Chief Bromden's eyes, the medical staff seems more insane than its own patients. As the Chief begins depicting the ward, one notices that everything works in an arrangement in which Nurse Ratched controls all, very similar to a dictatorship. This psychological landscape maintains the readers intrigued as to why the patients don't rebel against "the system" if they judge themselves so much not to be insane. Also, the precarious conditions in which the hospital finds itself ends up affecting all interns, where the three Black Boys exchange the eggs for a slob and they rape the patients. The Chief's delirium seems confusing at first, but it gains clarity when we see that in fact, they are carefully organized by the author to give the reader an understanding of the hospital as we would never receive from any other traditional narrator.

Nurse Ratched may appear a smiling, middle-aged woman to any other doctor or visitor on tours, but the Chief has an image of her as a monstrous creature that everyone should keep away from. One must keep in mind that the narrator suffers from something hallucinatory, so most of his descriptions of characters will seem fantastic. He says his medication has "microscopic wires and girds and transistors. This one designed to dissolve when in contact with air". He is a very large man, who feels weak and frail. The Chief is scared of the world but still has to maintain one eye opened by pretending he is "deaf and dumb".

This way, people can say whatever they wish without having to care that anyone is listening. The clash between individual and society is really interesting in this novel for all the characters have different phobias which keep them away from the world outside the ward, having as an example of individuals the people from the staff. According to the dictionary, insanity is "the state of being insane; unsoundness or derangement of mind; madness; lunacy". The patients in the ward have been considered mentally ill by society, and in some cases, by themselves. Certainly many of them show symptoms that causes the reader to label them as crazy but even Nurse Ratched's devotion to rules above all else can be seen as a kind of illness, except that nobody is has had the courage to confront her until now.