Protagonist Analyisis of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Essay Example

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Chief Bromden, though he is not technically the central figure, in many ways can be seen as the protagonist, and McMurphy, in fact the antagonist. The protagonist is the story’s main character. The first performer in ancient Greek theater, acting together with the choir was called the protagonist. In the contemporary period, a protagonist is described as an adherent or promoter of a political or social vision. In essence, the protagonist is the main character of any story and the incidents of the plot are directly linked to the protagonist. Playing the leading role, the protagonist usually receives the utmost sympathy from the audience. Generally the protagonist could be the lead who revels in being the heart of the story and provokes the audience’s emotions. The protagonist can also be the story’s villain, just like Chief Bromden. Numerous drama scholars, starting with Aristotle, have argued that the most fascinating characters are flawed. In the classic drama of Greece, just like in the plays of Shakespeare, the leading characters are stricken by what is generally called ‘a tragic flaw’. Although honorable, polite, and decent in numerous ways, they also have several weak points—desire, self-hatred, envy—a characteristic that results in their downfall. Such is the case with Chief Bromden. In contrast, the antagonist is the narrative’s enemy or the contradicting character. The protagonist in a narrative is looking for reconciliation; the antagonist, on the other hand, opposes this reconciliation, but every good narrative requires an antagonist. The antagonist is in actual struggle with the leading character in a narrative. The protagonist normally experiences several major changes in a narrative, but not all the time. Nevertheless, since the protagonist has been opposing the antagonist, his/her character develops. Although nonhuman impediments or elements could effectively work as the only type of conflict, it is usually the case that the presence of divergent elements in the form of characters will transform the struggles into a more subjective or individual and more intense conflict. Being set in opposition to a conscious rival will intensify the audience’s sense of threat and risk. A rival who is able to use his/her reason and tactic is much more challenging and more terrifying than any nonliving opposition can be. Differentiating the protagonist from the antagonist The reader’s blueprint to the realm of the Cuckoo’s Nest is the gigantic Chief Bromden, In numerous ways the story is basically the story of Chief Bromden as it is the story of McMurphy, and the former is essentially its protagonist. Because every fight McMurphy experiences in the ward are experienced by Chief Bromden too; Chief Bromden exhibits the utmost bravery in battling against the longest chances, and it is simply due to his ultimate triumph that the readers were given the chance to know about the tale of Cuckoo’s Nest in the least. Chief Bromden may appear at the outset an unbelievable storyteller. An individual who has for a long time faked his being deaf and mute, his thoughts are a muddle of apparently haphazard, frightening images and noises. In times of extreme pressure, the mind of Chief Bromden becomes completely covered by a thick cloud. His mind is freed from this cloud when he remembers his Indian childhood, but these joyful memories can also be broken by his uncertainties toward the present. But as one understands the dreams and hallucinations of Chief Bromden, one realizes they reveal a strangely precise image of the institution and of the disorder that took him there. He has been ruined by a group he names the Combine; actually, the Combine is only his unbalanced perception of elements that influence every individual. In the contemporary period, technologies damage the natural world, productivity is prioritized over splendor, and machine-like obedience is more preferred than individual liberty. Chief Bromden, being an Indian, was largely at-risk. Although smart and educated, he can only get hired in unskilled, boring occupations. His experiences in the Second World War are very terrifying they create the source for his nightmares of the fog device that works on the ward. Chief Bromden, nicknamed “Chief Broom” because the aides make him sweep the halls, narrates One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Although he says that he is telling the story about “the hospital, and her, and the guys—and about McMurphy,” he is also telling the story of his own journey toward sanity. When the novel begins, Bromden is paranoid, bullied, and surrounded much of the time by a hallucinated fog that represents both his medicated state and his desire to hide from reality. Moreover, he believes that he is extremely weak, even though he used to be immensely strong; because he believes it, he is extremely weak. By the end of the novel, the fog has cleared, and Bromden has recovered the personal strength to euthanize McMurphy, escape from the hospital, and record his account of the events. This oppression has been in place since Bromden’s childhood. He is the son of Chief Tee Ah Millatoona, which means The Pine That Stands Tallest on the Mountain, and a white woman, Mary Louise Bromden, the dominant force in the couple. Chief Bromden bears his mother’s last name; his father’s acceptance of her name symbolizes her dominance over him. In one telling experience, when Bromden was ten years old, three government officials came to see his father about buying the tribe’s land so they could build a hydroelectric dam, but Bromden was home alone. When he tried to speak to the officials, they acted as if he was not there. This experience sows the seeds for his withdrawal into himself, and initiates the outside world’s treatment of him as if he were deaf and dumb. Bromden’s mother joined forces with some of the members of the tribe to pressure Bromden’s father to sell the land. Bromden, like his father, is a big man who comes to feel small and helpless. The reason for Bromden’s hospitalization is cloaked in ambiguity. He may have had a breakdown from witnessing the decline of his father or from the horrors of fighting in World War II. Both of these possible scenarios involve an emasculating and controlling authority—in the first case the government officials, in the second the army. These authority figures provide Bromden with fodder for his dark vision of society as an oppressive conglomeration that he calls the Combine. It is also possible that, like McMurphy, Bromden was sane when he entered the hospital but that his sanity slipped when he received what is rumored to be 200 electroshock treatments. The paranoia and hallucinations he suffers from, which center on hidden machines in the hospital that physically and psychologically control the patients, can be read as metaphors for the dehumanization he has experienced in his life. Randle McMurphy—big, loud, sexual, dirty, and confident—is an obvious foil for the quiet and repressed Bromden and the sterile and mechanical Nurse Ratched. His loud, free laughter stuns the other patients, who have grown accustomed to repressed emotions. Throughout the entire moment of his introduction, not a single voice rises to meet his. McMurphy represents sexuality, freedom, and self-determination—characteristics that clash with the oppressed ward, which is controlled by Nurse Ratched. Through Chief Bromden’s narration, the novel establishes that McMurphy is not, in fact, crazy, but rather that he is trying to manipulate the system to his advantage. His belief that the hospital would be more comfortable than the Pendleton Work Farm, where he was serving a six-month sentence, haunts McMurphy later when he discovers the power Nurse Ratched wields over him—that she can send him for electroshock treatments and keep him committed as long as she likes. McMurphy’s sanity contrasts with what Kesey implies are an insane institution. McMurphy’s self-sacrifice on behalf of his ward-mates echoes Christ’s sacrifice of himself on the cross to redeem humankind. McMurphy’s actions frequently parallel Christ’s actions in the Gospels. McMurphy undergoes a kind of baptism upon entering the ward, and he slowly gathers disciples around him as he increases his rebellion against Ratched. When he takes the group of patients fishing, he is like Christ leading his twelve disciples to the sea to test their faith. Finally, McMurphy’s ultimate sacrifice, his attack on Ratched, combined with the symbolism of the cross-shaped electroshock table and McMurphy’s request for “a crown of thorns,” cements the image of the Christ-like martyrdom that McMurphy has achieved by sacrificing his freedom and sanity. Conclusions Kesey uses mechanical imagery to represent modern society and biological imagery to represent nature. By means of mechanisms and machines, society gains control of and suppresses individuality and natural impulses. The hospital, representative of society at large, is decidedly unnatural: the aides and Nurse Ratched are described as being made of motley machine parts. In Chief Bromden’s dream, when Blastic is disemboweled, rust, not blood, spills out, revealing that the hospital destroyed not only his life but his humanity as well. Bromden’s realization that the hospital treats human beings in an unnatural fashion, and his concomitant growing self-awareness, occur as a surrounding fog dissipates. It is no surprise that Bromden believes this fog is a construction of machines controlled by the hospital and by Nurse Ratched. Bromden, as the son of an Indian chief, is a combination of pure, natural individuality and a spirit almost completely subverted by mechanized society. Early on, he had free will, and he can remember and describe going hunting in the woods with his relatives and the way they spear salmon. The government, however, eventually succeeds in paying off the tribe so their fishing area can be converted into a profitable hydroelectric dam. The tribe members are banished into the technological workforce, where they become “hypnotized by routine,” like the “half-life things” that Bromden witnesses coming out of the train while he is on fishing excursions. In the novel’s present time, Bromden himself ends up semi-catatonic and paranoid, a mechanical drone who is still able to think and conjecture to some extent on his own. McMurphy represents unbridled individuality and free expression—both intellectual and sexual. One idea presented in this novel is that a man’s virility is equated with a state of nature, and the state of civilized society requires that he be desexualized. But McMurphy battles against letting the oppressive society make him into a machinelike drone, and he manages to maintain his individuality until his ultimate objective—bringing this individuality to the others—is complete. However, when his wildness is provoked one too many times by Nurse Ratched, he ends up being destroyed by modern society’s machines of oppression. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008. Print. Fish, Peter. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, 1984. Print. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print. Read More