Preview

Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: Dystopian Themes

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
620 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: Dystopian Themes
Dystopian Themes

In dystopian novels, it is often seen that the way of living is not favorable and many common themes occur throughout different dystopian novels and some not so typical dystopian novels. Dystopia is defined as an imaginary place where the conditions of life are extremely bad and unpleasant. Although One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not a typical dystopian novel, it shares similar themes as the dystopian novel 1984 such as, lack of privacy, total control, and instilling fear and torture into its “members”. One of the most well known dystopian novels is 1984 by George Orwell. 1984 demonstrates the perfect examples of how unpleasant a dystopian world is. One of the main issues in 1984 is the lack of privacy

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The governments of 1984 and America both violate the privacy of their citizens. In Orwell 's 1984, the government violates its citizen 's privacy by monitoring them, using telescreens and the "thought police." Knowing that "at any rate they [the government] could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to," one could never achieve peace of mind. One has "to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound they made was overheard…and every moment scrutinized." (49) The citizen 's right to privacy has been taken away, and furthermore, citizens in Oceania are not just being watched, but every one of their actions is studied closely. If one is suspected of a "thought-crime," they are harshly punished. The people in each society are forced to bottle up their emotions and thoughts about their government, and suppress their urge to rebel against the Oceanic Party. This creates a sense of uneasiness for the citizens and a need for a safe place to go where they can freely express themselves without being watched. Likewise, the government today restricts the privacy of its citizens. Around every corner lay security cameras, often causing citizens discomfort. The cameras discourage citizens from…

    • 810 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The movie is based on Ken Kesey’s best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We discover in the film that the Chief is not really dumb and deaf, Billy can speak without stuttering and others do not have to live under the harsh rules of Nurse Ratched. McMurphy will cure them, not by giving them pills and group sessions but by encouraging them to be guys. To go fishing, play basketball, watch the World Series, get drunk, get laid, etc. The message for these mental disturbed men is to be like R. P. McMurphy.…

    • 428 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Show how a pairing of two texts this year gave you an understanding of how authors can present similar ideas in different ways.…

    • 1130 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Points of view have a great impact throughout stories sequences. The points of views provide details and evoke emotions that implies readers anxiety as well as depicts images in the reader’s mind. Moreover, a good observer is a good story teller. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a novel written in 1962, by Ken Kesey, illustrates the use and misuse of authority from hospitals and their administrators, passive racism faced because of origin, and the desire of changes to be made. Throughout Chief Bromden’s point of view along the novel, readers depict ideas of patients live’s within the ward under the administrator’s harsh regimen and consequences in the result of the patients’ rebellion against authority.…

    • 762 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Essay on cuckoo's nest

    • 711 Words
    • 3 Pages

    How does Kesey use narrative structure, foreshadowing and symbolism to create a tragic form in ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’?…

    • 711 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    How does the author use the interactions between the central character and two other characters to explore ideas in the text?…

    • 663 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As I recently completed reading your world fame story, “One who flew over the Cuckoo's Nest” which explains the first person perspective of a patient who joins and becomes a friend with a stubborn rebel who rallies himself with the other patients to dethrone a nurse obsessed with power in the Mental Ward. Overall with certain confusing aspects of the story, the book is a well written piece of history.…

    • 718 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, the narrator, Bromden, is seen as a weak character who is submissive to the authority in the mental facility. Nurse Ratched or Big Nurse runs the mental facility with fear and is only challenged when Randle McMurphy becomes a patient who rebels against her system. The section in the story where McMurphy and Bromden are about to receive punishment after rebelling relates to the overall story as the readers can see how Bromden is changing to become a stronger person with McMurphy’s influence. He starts off as a powerless and scared patient and ends up growing as a person by seeing that he has the power to control his life and make decisions on his own. Throughout the book, the theme that with someone to lead or set an example, others can stand up for themselves after being oppressed is seen.…

    • 687 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, there is a strong central focus of the challenges faced by having an alternative outlook on society by which is normally perceived by the majority of people. Both novels share a character that is an outcast in society due to several factors such as insanity, ignorance, and negligence. These two characters speak in first person narrative telling the reader about their life in the past years. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this character is Chief Bromden, a psychiatric patient in a hospital telling the story of a man named McMurphy, who enters the ward and…

    • 867 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, written by Ken Kesey in 1962, is a book about a lively con man that turns a mental institution upside down with his rambunctious antics and sporadic bouts with the head nurse. Throughout the book, this man shows the others in the institution how to stand up for themselves, to challenge conformity to society and to be who they want to be. It is basically a book of good versus evil, the good being the con man R.P. McMurphy, and the bad being the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. McMurphy revitalizes the hope of the patients, fights Nurse Ratched's stranglehold on the ward, and, in a way, represents the feelings of the author on society at the time.…

    • 938 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The advancement of technology over the last decade has been used to further security methods in society. Devices such as surveillance systems in stores have caught suspects and decreased crime, but only by a mere 0.05% (Welsh, Farrington) (specifically in Chicago, which currently has 15,000 cameras throughout the city). So, does this implementation of surveillance really make people behave? The texts “Panopticism” by Michel Foucault and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey both focus on how to make people behave. Foucault's theory explains that if surveillance is used on people in seclusion, the authorities will claim ultimate control. Kesey’s novel challenges this theory once new ward member McMurphy is transferred in, as he provokes…

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Society is a judgmental and rejecting place. It only allows uniform individuals to be in this society which discards anyone’s individuality and pride. In the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, Nurse Ratched alienates the patients’ individualities which only allows them to never progress in their mental health. The society rejects the people who are not normal. In this case, the people are the ones with mental disorders. Kesey’s anti-establishment point of view against society portrays that the government misuses power to manipulate society which leads to the suppression of individuality through the literary devices analogy, metaphor, and symbolism.…

    • 1158 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Essay On Dystopia

    • 583 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Most of you have heard the word 'dystopia' before, but maybe you don't know the true meaning of it. It may be determined in a theoretical fiction and science fiction as well. Besides fiction this word includes horror, apocalyptic, unnatural, fantasy, and unknown ideas that didn’t or might not even happen yet. It reflects the opposite of Utopia, the perfect world where human nature haven’t faced any problems. Dystopia is different from ‘utopia’ by its prefix ‘dys’ that tells us all the negative side of the word; it is the same as words like ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘dyslexia’.…

    • 583 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Fahrenheit 451

    • 404 Words
    • 2 Pages

    A dystopia looks at an idea of social balance to be pessimistic. They are solely fictional, representing grim, depressive societies. Dystopias are typically supposed to scare the reader, yet there is a sense of comfort because of the fact that it is purely fictional. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, this novel's setting is a complex dystopia where not a soul is truly happy, family isn’t certain and society doesn’t allow someone to be true to themselves.…

    • 404 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the middle of the twentieth century, mental hospitals were seen as a waste of money, highly inhumane, and very ineffective. Around the 1960s, President Kennedy made it a priority to start reforming the nation’s mental health institutions, hoping to improve them. By the 1970s, a series of landmark court cases made it illegal for a hospital to retain or even possibly treat a patient against their will. In the year 1975, the drama film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest swept the Oscars, which offered the public a scathing denunciation towards mental hospitals. To illustrate, a person who suffers from schizophrenia cannot help but believe the voices they hear and the people they see. To them they are real and there is no cure for this cruel disease. Many families don't know how to cope with it because from everyone else’s eyes they see a person who is harming another person, but in that person’s eyes they see someone else forcing them to do so and telling them they have to do such a horrifying dead. Something as major as that can send that person straight to jail.…

    • 559 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays