Blog 1 Cuckoos Nest

My least favorite character of the novel is easily Nurse Ratched. She is overly controlling and likes to manipulate the patients in the hospital. She likes to make the patients feel like they are "smaller" then they are, "'Miss, I don't like to create trouble. But I don't like to swallow something without knowing what it is neither.' 'If Mr.Taber chooses to act like a child, he may have to be treated as such. We've tried to be kind and considerate with him. Obviously, that's not the answer...You can go, Mr.Taber, if you don't want to take your medication orally' "(35). She wouldn't tell Mr.Taber what type of medication he was taking and, of course, he fought back, but she acts as if he is in the wrong and she won't tell him and will force it on him because of his unwillingness to take it. She likes to force things the patients don't want on to them. In the beginning of the novel Nurse Ratched forces Bromden into a shower and shave room. "If you yell its just tougher on you. I hold back the yelling. I hold back till they get to my temples"(13). This is when they are putting him in the shower. She likes to make the men feel like they are just a part of her machine, the way the hospitals runs is very orderly and in line and she doesn't like anything less of that. I don't like the way she treats the men, I don't think anyone likes the way she treats them. She likes to run their group therapy sessions too, she doesn't want anything to be said or herd that she doesn't approve of and Harding points that out; " Is this the usual pro-cedure for these group therapy shindigs, a pecking party"(70)? Harding points out that the way the group therapy is run is like a pecking party, relating it to chickens pecking until the patients crack. Even the group therapy ran by Nurse Ratched is torturous to the patients in the ward. She doesn't do anything good for the patients nothing helpful, only harmful. Thats why she is my least favorite character, reading about the way she disrespects the patients and her control over human beings as if they were animals is bull shit. I don't understand where this control she needs to have came from? Maybe when she was younger she had no control over her own life and is taking it out on these men, or maybe she's just a crazy person. She doesn't have a right to talk down on men especially men in psychiatric need.