One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest And Hamlet Analysis
836 Words4 Pages
One flew over the Danish
The human conscience is something that we, as people, may never gain complete understanding of. At some point during the splitting of our cells, and the development of our physical form, a conscience is birthed. We can’t even point to its location on the diagram of a brain, yet it remains one of the core building blocks of humanity. Equally as delicate as it is untouchable, a person's sanity can be morphed into a darker, more sickening, entity within seconds. Rampant with bloodshed and unmatchable amounts of violence, our celestial space ball is a seething, festering melting pot of chaos and it’s no wonder why millions of people teeter over the dark edge of madness, many never to return. When comparing the main character…show more content… Schizophrenia is the product of the lethal combination of a “chemical imbalance in the brain and a toxic or stressful environment” ( Mcglashen 2). Randall Mcmurphy (the protagonist in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest) and Hamlet parallel each other because both men had experienced a mentally damaging event. Mcmurphy was a prisoner in the Korean War; war being one of the most recognized stress factors in mental illness, and the conditions he was exposed to in the war overlaps with how he was treated in the mental hospital. He endured several brutal electroshock therapy sessions, each one of them leaving him an immobilized screaming mess, and even received a lobotomy towards the end of his stay. The isolation from the outside world, paired with the barbaric treatment administered by the staff at the hospital, could very well have been a reminder of sorts to the days he spent in the camp, which in turn, triggered the degradation of his sanity. Hamlet, much like Mcmurphy, witnessed the ghost of his dead father revealing the true nature of his death. Not only was Hamlet already vulnerable after the death of his father, He is told that his own uncle, now the man in the big chair, was the culprit of his father's murder. For both of these characters, the downward spiral only picks up momentum when boosted by these dehumanizing…show more content… Mcmurphy shows obvious signs of heightened agitation and aggression as he slowly begins to take a more violent and abrasive approach to things. His outbursts of rage carried a more colorful vocabulary and his weapon of choice transitioned from his big mouth, to the knuckles on his fist. This loss of empathy and feeling for those he was up against is one of the defining symptoms of severe schizophrenia. This loss of feeling is a considered a “breaking point” in the development of the disease, as it's around this stage where patients begin to experience “extreme delusions and hallucinations”( Mcglashen 4), if the schizophrenia reaches that point of severity. The point of no return in, Mcmurphy's case, was when he tried to manually dilute the amount of oxygen in Ratchets brain. This strangulation is a checkpoint in the progression of his psychosis because at that point, schizophrenia had overcome him, and Ratchets “rigged game” (Kessey 86) remained intact. Much like Mcmurphy, Hamlet was no stranger to these symptoms. He too experienced the very same red flags, although to a higher degree. The loss of empathy in Hamlet's case was extreme, as the slaying of Polonius seemed like dust in the wind to him. Much like Mcmurphy, Hamlet visibly became more and more boisterous and incoherent as he spoke, and after a while, wasn't able to take anything seriously. Hamlet also experienced vivid