Going Beyond the Authority of the Mind
Human Dignity in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
By Zeynep Fulya Boyacıoğlu and Fatma Hazal Yahşi
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a tragedy novel written by Ken Kesey in 1962. The book is about the patients in an asylum superintended by a nurse called Ratched. The book significantly illustrates the violation of human dignity because Ratched is too cruel towards patients and the hospital administration does not care about them, which is why the patients are exposed to cruel treatment. One of the patients, Ellis, becomes incurable because of electroshock therapy: he is nailed to a wall in the daytime, and he always wets himself.
The narrator of the book is Chief Bromden, who receives treatment for his hallucinations in an asylum. He pretends to be deaf and mute since he does not want to socialize, but his life begins to change when the protagonist Randle McMurphy is sent to the asylum because of gambling, battery, and statutory rape. McMurphy incites a rebellion for the patients in the asylum; he tries to show the patients that they are not entirely crazy. He always tries to explain what freedom is like, and after his attempts, most of the patients’ attitudes begin to change; they begin to develop self-esteem, feel freer and more independent and begin to live their lives. In a short time, McMurphy becomes the leader of the patients, but the hospital administration blames him for subverting the asylum’s rules and begins to give him electroshock therapy. In the end, he gets into a vegetative state because Ratched has McMurphy lobotomized after his attempts to attack her. However, Bromden kills McMurphy because he does not want him to be in a vegetative state because of Ratched’s authority, so he wants an honourable death for his friend. At the end of the novel, Ratched loses her authority and Bromden gets his freedom by finally finding enough courage to escape from the asylum.
In this novel, human dignity is demonstrated through the violence and inhuman behaviours that patients are exposed to by Ratched and the hospital administration. The hospital administration’s treatment of the patients is tantamount to torture, which is associated with Ratched’s cruel authority and her desire to dominate patients. This domination causes patients to be afraid of Ratched and therefore they obey everything she says. In this way, human dignity was disregarded; while Ratched shows her power through the patients, the hospital administration does not care about the cruel treatment of the patients in any way which destroys patients’ lives and their identities. Thus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest refers to real life by showing us the cruel treatment that patients have been exposed to in the past and it underlines the importance of treating every patient in humane ways and with care.
