McMurphy V. Big Nurse...

Throughout Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, a rivalry is established between two key players at the institution. In one corner of the ring, we have Nurse Ratched, aka Big Nurse; the power and control behind the staff, "her face smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh colored enamel." (Kesey 11) Big Nurse has sly demeanor. She exists only for the pure pleasure of putting other people in their places and making her patients feel inferior and inadequit. Big Nurse wants the institution to be her oyster, and its population her sycophants. The truth is, she couldn't be any more successful at acheiving her narcissistic goals. UNTIL...

Randall. Patrick. McMurphy.



In the other corner, R.P. McMurphy steals the wind from her sails and sells it back to her at an increased rate. "He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. He laces his fingers over his belly without taking his thumbs out of his pockets. I see how big and beat his hands are" (Kesey 16) He marches to the beat of his own drum; an eccentric, a maveric, a free-spirited man. He has never subscribed to the typical societal norms, and he never will. No, McMurphy's motives lie elsewhere. A defiant man with purpose; he takes a breath of institutional air and decides to make the place his own. In doing so he wins the hearts of his peers (and even some staff). So do the math...



We have an egotistical, power hungry nurse, driven merely by rules and formalities. We have a one-of-a-kind, gambling, good-timing son of a gun. Who will be victorious?

The truth is: neither one. Sure, Big Nurse forces McMurphy to have a labotomy, eventually leading him down the path of his death, but did she really win? McMurphy set out to change the lives of those in the institution and there is NO doubt in my mind that that is exactly what he accomplished. Every single patient there was a better person due to him. They each won in their own respective ways.