Analyzing Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Essay 4: The Novel
In your fourth essay, you will be analyzing Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You will be expected to discuss the modern novelistic form as well the thematic and discursive meaning of the work.
Your essay must be formatted correctly and written clearly. If you struggle with grammar, please seek help from me, from your peers, and from other resources available on campus.
Essay Features:Length: 3 Full pages
Formatting: MLA style
Essay Topic Prompts (Choose One)
1. Analyze the setting of the novel, the psychiatric ward, as a microcosmic to-scale model of the larger faceless institutional systems of the modern world, that is, Bromden’s “Combine.”
2. Dissect the tragic plot of the novel, its cycles of adventure and danger, complications and reversals, and the cathartic climax, for its dramatizing of the themes of prudence and risk, self-interest and community, freedom and control.
3. Choose a recurring symbol or imagistic leitmotif in the novel—such as birds, machines, food, hands, laughter, or fishing — to probe its connotations and resonances for understanding the conflict between agency and passivity, warmth and loneliness, rebirth and destruction, or oppression and hope.
4. Analyze the characterization of Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched as three-dimensional foils, their contradictions and ambiguities that deflate oversimplistic black-and-white visions of good and evil.
5. Examine the unreliable narrative point of view of Chief Bromden, the subtlety of his reflections as well as the way his memory merges with hallucination.
Answer preview to analyzing Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
APA
930 words