Friday, May 3, 2019
One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey Annotated Bibliography
One flew all over the cuckoos nest by Ken Kesey - Annotated Bibliography ExampleThe significance of the nurse in American literature is that it is a metaphor for society the dehumanizing force of administrative and medical power is likened to mechanical Combine which is a great machinery of oppression. Normal human behaviours are suppressed and the machinery of power is challenged by the tragic hero McMurphy. In the finale he is lobotomized and finally killed by the narrator. It sounds like a horror story and it has very serious themes, moreover there is a lot of humor in the dialogue and in the quirky character of McMurphy.This book contains a short and fascinating discussion of the character of Nurse Ratched, the Big Nurse. Using Freudian and Jungian psychological concepts, Aguiar shows how McMurphy sets himself up to fight a huge battle with a typical ball-cutter, which reveals his panic of the castrating female. This is then described as an archetypal mother hatred scenar io, and Aguiar suggests that all of the male patients in the founding see Nurse Ratched as a mother figure, and they apparently masochistically project their fear of their knowledge mothers onto her. The target of McMurphys rebellion is not just the authority that Nurse Ratched holds, but also her genuine femininity, and this is made clear when McMurphy attacks her and exposes her large breasts. Aguiar explores a Jungian analysis of this act in terms of the Oedipus complex, but somehow this analysis is unconvincing. After all Nurse Ratched triumphs over McMurphy in the end, and it could be argued that she is as oft a victim of the oppressive system as he is. This book pursues a very fuddled feminist line, but in Keseys novel it finds more questions than answers, throwing up a number of fascinate theories, none of which address the mixed male/female/machine persona that is Nurse Ratched, or the unquestionably positive view that the young McMurphy formed of women and heterosexu al love.This book examines issues around the religious nature of the
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