One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Conformity, Oppression as a Juxtaposition Between Sanity, Insanity

Henry David Thoreau believed that "the only place for a just man is. . . a prison." As he spent his time in a jail, the famous writer concluded that majority rules in a society "not because [it is] most likely to be in the right. . . but because [it is] physically the strongest." Perhaps the dysfunction of the prisons is a mirror image of the hidden, buried troubles in all people. It is society who dictated norms and urges conformity, while those individuals who reject societal views and pressures are the ones deemed insane. Ken Kesey wove a similar mirror image of society and asylums into his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which tells the story of a cowboy-like outlaw named Randall McMurphy who is introduced into a mental institution to contain his behavior but instead incites rebellion among the patients who suffer under the overbearing Big Nurse and aides like Doctor Spivey. McMurphy, Chief Bromden, and Harding represent a uniqueness or variation of humanity and personality discarded by society and pressured into conformity by Big Nurse, a puppet of modern "truths," and Doctor Spivey, a bystander resembling the typical American.