One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Comparison

In Beloved and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, society plays a significant role in the lives of the characters and the events in the plot. In Beloved, the African American community in Cincinnati, Ohio shuns Sethe and her family for their pride and fails to save her and her children. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, society, as the Combine, literally separates itself from the characters, isolating them in asylums to be repaired and returned, and, by isolating them and attempting to repair them, society initiates the conflict in the novel. In both novels, society casts out the main characters and catalyzes the plot, proving to be an extremely influential force. The main characters of both novels are ostracized by society. In Beloved, the
The characters are all patients in a mental ward within a hospital in Oregon. They are physically restricted within that ward, with extremely rare opportunities to venture into the outside world. The patients rarely contact the outside world, rarely receive visits, and have little to no connection to society beyond one hour of news every day and the nurses and doctors on the ward. Additionally, society also ostracizes all the characters within the novel due to the stigma of mental disorders, exemplified by their manipulation of the gas station attendants whom they scared and intimidated by playing to their preconceptions and the stereotype of the mentally afflicted. The attendant realizes that they “are from that asylum” as he backs away from the car to a pile of empty bottles he could use as a weapon (Kesey, 235). Kesey italicizes asylum to emphasize the stigma around it. The reader can almost hear the fear, particularly highlighted in the attendant’s attempt to find a weapon, and disgust in his voice as he says it. Society fears them and dislikes them for not fitting in, and because of that, it separates them as much as
It forces its rejects into the mental asylum, either by law as in the case of McMurphy, or by fear, as in the case of most of the voluntary patients who fear the outside world and the society that dominates it. Likewise, Chief Bromden sees society as the Combine, a scary, massive, secret organization that controls the world by slowly turning everyone and everything into machines it controls perfectly. He believes the ward is a repair station, where Nurse Ratched fixes the defective machines, the faulty products of society, and then sends them back upon repair. “The ward is a factory for the Combine” that fixes “mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches” (Kesey 40). Calling the ward a factory introduces the machinery theme that Kesey constantly employs from Chief Bromden’s perspective. It sets up the idea of society as a cold, heartless, mechanical entity whose members are also mechanical and which depends on the ward to fix errors made in production. Here, the schools, neighborhoods, and churches, what would normally constitute society, are the producers of these mechanical beings belonging to the Combine. To Chief Bromden, society is the Combine, and all the patients reside in the mental ward because they are in some way defective and need to be repaired. This attempt to repair the patients, through Nurse Ratched’s iron rule, instigates the battle