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One flew over the cuckoo's nest samenvatting + literaire kenmerken £3.43   Add to cart

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One flew over the cuckoo's nest samenvatting + literaire kenmerken

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In this document you will find a summary and a number of elaborate literary features of the book One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

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  • September 3, 2022
  • 21
  • 2022/2023
  • Book review
  • Unknown
  • Secondary school
  • 6
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Chief Bromden, a long-term patient in Nurse Ratched’s psychiatric ward, narrates the events

of the novel. The book begins as he awakens to a typical day on the ward, feeling paranoid

about the illicit nighttime activities of the ward’s three black aides. The aides mock him for

being a pushover, even though he is six feet seven inches tall, and they make him sweep

the hallways for them, nicknaming him “Chief Broom.” Bromden is half Indian and pretends

to be deaf and dumb; as a result, he overhears all the secrets on the ward and is barely

noticed by anyone despite his stature.


Nurse Ratched, whom Bromden refers to as “the Big Nurse,” enters the ward with a gust of

cold air. Bromden describes Ratched as having “skin like flesh-colored enamel” and lips and

fingertips the strange orange color of polished steel. Her one feminine feature is her

oversized bosom, which she tries to conceal beneath a starched white uniform. When she

gets angry with the aides, Bromden sees her get “big as a tractor.” She orders the aides to

shave Bromden, and he begins to scream and hallucinate that he is being surrounded by

machine-made fog until he is forcedly medicated. He tells us that his forthcoming story about

the hospital might seem “too awful to be the truth.”


Bromden regains consciousness in the day room. Here, he tells us that a public relations

man sometimes leads tours around the ward, pointing out the cheery atmosphere and

claiming that the ward is run without the brutality exercised in previous generations. Today,

the ward’s monotony is interrupted when Randle McMurphy, a new patient, arrives.

McMurphy’s appearance is preceded by his boisterous, brassy voice and his confident, iron-

heeled walk. McMurphy laughs when the patients are stunned silent by his entrance. It is the

first real laugh that the ward has heard in years.


McMurphy, a large redhead with a devilish grin, swaggers around the ward in his motorcycle

cap and dirty work-farm clothes, with a leather jacket over one arm. He introduces himself as

a gambling fool, saying that he requested to be transferred to the hospital to escape the

drudgery of the Pendleton Work Farm. He asks to meet the “bull goose loony” so he can

take over as the man in charge. He encounters Billy Bibbit, a thirty-one-year-old baby-faced

man with a severe stutter, and Dale Harding, the effeminate and educated president of the

,Patients’ Council. All the while, McMurphy sidesteps the attempts of the daytime aides to

herd him into the admission routine of a shower, an injection, and a rectal thermometer.


McMurphy surveys the day room. The patients are divided into two main categories: the

Acutes, who are considered curable, and the Chronics, whom Bromden, himself a Chronic,

calls “machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired.” The Chronics who can move around

are Walkers, and the rest are either Wheelers or Vegetables. Some Chronics are patients

who arrived at the hospital as Acutes but were mentally crippled by excessive shock

treatment or brain surgery, common practices in the hospital. Nurse Ratched encourages the

Acutes to spy on one another. If one reveals an embarrassing or incriminating personal

detail, the rest race to write it in the logbook. Their reward for such disclosures is sleeping

late the next morning.


Nurse Ratched runs her ward on a strict schedule, controlling every movement with absolute

precision. The nurse has selected her aides for their inherent cruelty and her staff for their

submissiveness. Bromden recalls Maxwell Taber, a patient who demanded information

about his medications. He was sent for multiple electroshock treatments and rendered

completely docile. Eventually, he was considered cured and was discharged. Bromden

conceives of society as a huge, oppressive conglomeration that he calls the Combine, and

he sees the hospital as a factory for “fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in

the schools and in the churches.”


During the Group Meeting, Nurse Ratched reopens the topic of Harding’s difficult

relationship with his wife. When McMurphy makes lewd jokes at the nurse’s expense, she

retaliates by reading his file aloud, focusing on his arrest for statutory rape. McMurphy

regales the group with stories about the sexual appetite of his fifteen-year-old lover. Even

Doctor Spivey enjoys McMurphy’s humorous rebellion against Ratched. The doctor reads

from the file, “Don’t overlook the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis to

escape the drudgery of the work farm,” to which McMurphy responds, “Doctor, do I look like

a sane man?” McMurphy has similar defiant retorts for almost any action Ratched can

consider, which perturbs Ratched greatly. McMurphy is disconcerted that the patients and

, the doctor can smile but not laugh. Bromden remembers a meeting that was broken up when

Pete Bancini, a lifelong Chronic who constantly declared he was tired, became lucid for a

moment and hit one of the aides. The nurse injected him with a sedative as he had a

nervous breakdown.


During the meeting, the patients tear into Harding’s sexual problems. Afterward, they are

embarrassed, as always, at their viciousness. As a new participant and observer, McMurphy

tells Harding that the meeting was a “pecking party”—the men acted like a bunch of chickens

pecking at another chicken’s wound. He warns them that a pecking party can wipe out the

whole flock. When McMurphy points out that Nurse Ratched pecks first, Harding becomes

defensive and states that Ratched’s procedure is therapeutic. McMurphy replies that she is

merely a “ball-cutter.”

Harding finally agrees that Ratched is a cruel, vicious woman. He explains that everyone in

the ward is a rabbit in a world ruled by wolves. They are in the hospital because they are

unable to accept their roles as rabbits. Nurse Ratched is one of the wolves, and she is there

to train them to accept their rabbit roles. She can make a patient shrink with shame and fear

while acting like a concerned angel of mercy. Ratched never accuses directly, but she rules

others through insinuation. McMurphy says that they should tell her to go to hell with her

insinuating questions. Harding warns that such hostile behavior will earn a man electroshock

therapy and a stay in the Disturbed ward. He points to Bromden, calling him “a six-foot-eight

sweeping machine” as a result of all the shock treatment he has received. Harding asserts

that the only power men have over women is sexual violence, but they cannot even exercise

that power against the icy, impregnable nurse. McMurphy makes a bet with the other

patients that he can make Nurse Ratched lose her temper within a week. He explains that he

conned his way out of the work farm by feigning insanity, and Nurse Ratched is unprepared

for an enemy with a “trigger-quick mind” like his. Immediately upon his arrival, McMurphy

challenges the ward with his exuberant vitality and sexuality, which are directly opposed to

the sterile, mechanical nature of the hospital and modern society. He is set up as an obvious

foil to Nurse Ratched, as well as to the silent and repressed Bromden. McMurphy’s

discussion with Harding reveals the misogynistic undertones of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s

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