At the center of this controlled universe is Nurse Ratched, a representative of what Bromden calls the Combine, meaning the oppressive force of society and authority. Bromden describes her in mechanical, inhuman terms.
What is the combine that Chief Describes And how is Nurse Ratched a part of it?
A former army nurse, Nurse Ratched represents the oppressive mechanization, dehumanization, and emasculation of modern society—in Bromden’s words, the Combine. Her nickname is “Big Nurse,” which sounds like Big Brother, the name used in George Orwell’s novel 1984 to refer to an oppressive and all-knowing authority.
What is the main lesson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
Lesson Summary
Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, portrays a group of male patients who rebel against the authorities in their asylum. The novel explores the importance of free expression and the need to challenge authority.
Does Bromden escape?
When he is returned to the ward after the operation, he is a vegetable. That same night, Bromden suffocates McMurphy with a pillow. He throws the control panel through a window screen and escapes from the hospital, hitching a ride with a trucker.
What does McMurphy mean by pecking party?
McMurphy describes a “pecking party” as a situation in which chickens see blood on another chicken and start pecking at it like crazy until they’re all bloody, pecking at each other in a frenzy, and end up killing each other. McMurphy points out that Nurse Ratched’s Therapeutic Community meetings are pecking parties.
What does Chief Bromden hallucination about?
Chief’s hallucination takes him on a nightmarish trip to what he believes lies beneath the hospital floor. He envisions the machinery of the Combine pumping fog and eviscerating Blastic. He imagines the hospital’s Public Relations man conducting a tour for school teachers and college co-eds.
What does the fog mean in Cuckoo’s Nest?
The Fog Machine
In this novel, fogs symbolize a lack of insight and an escape from reality. When Bromden starts to slip away from reality, because of his medication or out of fear, he hallucinates fog drifting into the ward.
How does Chief Bromden describe the ward?
How does Chief Bromden describe the ward? He looks around the ward as a new man might, he catalogues and classifies. Matter-of-fact description, gives the impression of objectivity. Emphasizes the regimentation and depersonalization of the inmates.
What does Nurse Ratched do when McMurphy turns on the TV to watch the World Series?
When he turns on the TV, Ratched cuts its power, but McMurphy does not budge from the armchair. The Acutes follow suit and sit in front of the blank TV. She screams and rants at them for breaking the schedule, and McMurphy wins his bet that he could make her lose her composure.
What’s a combine do?
It can harvest crops like corn, wheat, soybeans, rye, barley and oats. After gathering crops, the combine cuts them at the base, feeds them into a threshing drum that shakes the grains away from their stalks and sweeps the unwanted material to the back of the machine.
How is the ward a factory for the combine?
“The ward is a factory for the Combine. It’s For fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up and good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart” (40)
Who is Scanlon One Flew Over?
Scanlon: A patient obsessed with explosives and destruction. He is the only other non-vegetative patient confined to the ward by force aside from McMurphy and Bromden; the rest can leave at any time. Jim Sefelt and Bruce Fredrickson: Two epileptic patients.
