He bets the patients that he ruins her composure within a week and wins his bet. Nurse Ratched is labelled a 'Ball cutter' by McMurphy.
McMurphy's admission sparks a revolution of liberty in the ward as McMurphy begins to battle with Nurse Ratched for control of ward policy. He has been transferred to the facility under the suspicion of being a psychopath, a lie he deliberately concocted. McMurphy is the protagonist of the book, a gambler, and a seasoned womaniser. Bromden pretends to be mute and roams the halls like an unseen phantom, and through his eyes, we meet RP McMurphy. An almost machine-like person that controls the minutest details of her patient's lives with the help of a brainwashed staff. TThe book is narrated by Chief Bromden, a large half-native American patient in a mental ward that is ruled by the cold and cruel Nurse Ratched. The Japanese nurse even goes so far as to suggest that single women over the age of 35 should be dismissed from service, seeming to propagate the common viewpoint of the time about old spinsters and their hateful ways.
For example, Kesey refers to the Black orderlies in the ward as “the Black boys” even though they are quite old adults, and in the initial parts of the book, there is a strong implication that these orderlies have sex with one another.Īll the female characters in the book can only be cast in two roles: a mother figure seeking to control men, like Nurse Ratched, or they are depicted as objects of sex that are to be used by the men. It was written and published before the Civil rights movement, and it has an unflattering depiction of the Black characters. The book has been criticised for its sometimes racist and misogynistic prose. This novel was written by Kesey while he worked as an orderly in a Mental hospital, and it focuses strongly on where the difference between sane and insane lies.
Other writers involved within the same movement were Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. The writers of the Beat Generation defied social and literary norms in their writing. The dropping of the atomic bomb and the disastrous military action in Vietnam have been said to be precipitating factors. This book is a product of the Beat Generation movement that came about as people became aware of the human rights violations and otherwise that the American government had brought about.
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