Machines, Machines

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest uses symbolism to explain and impose the theme of insanity. The strongest symbol throughout the novel is that of “the machinery”. We should then ask what is “the machinery”? Ken Kesey uses the basic understanding of machines as purposeful and effective inventions to succumb the reader into understanding the working of entities, specifically a mental institution. The author suggests that the mental institution works with the efficiency and lack of emotion as any machine does, patients are carried in to be processed and hopefully some day emerge fixed. This novel critiques institutions because of the way they work, blindly treating patients as other machines instead of what they are: scared human beings.

“ ‘I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; on this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.’ ” (163)

Now that we’ve identified what the machine is we should ask ourselves what for? This symbolism takes on the understanding of machines as both effective and inhumane and the oppressive methods used at the hospital can be regarded as such. Patients are punished and heavily drugged so they won’t cause any trouble. We can therefore infer that Kesey’s use of a machine to represent this hospital is clearly a critique on the understanding of insanity by the human society. Crazy people are regarded as broken because they don’t work normally. “If somebody’s of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty year old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order recriminations, they’d of though the whole bunch was crazy loons.” (126) The novel poses a valid point: crazy is the label given on people who we don’t care enough to “fix”. It’s much easier to label some one as crazy and send him off to the loony bin instead of actually understanding how that person thinks.

Kesey considers human society to be very lazy, humans choose to avoid complications by becoming machines, with no emotion, no compassion. If the hospital wanted to treat patients in the ways they require they could. But it’s much easier to give them an awful lot of medication and have them be brain dead for the rest of the day than having personalized therapies, they become a huge medication machine. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest portrays human society quite accurately. We believe can just pass most of our problems to the next person without regard to how much worse this problem will get.

“‘ I don’t agree that he should be sent up from disturbed, which would simply be an easy way of passing our problem on to anther ward and I don’t agree that he is some kind of extraordinary being—some kind of ‘super’ psychopath.’” (136)