One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Satire Terms Analysis

“Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby-doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils-everything working together except the color on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom.

A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.

Incongruity: Something strangely, shockingly, or ridiculously out of place

Analysis: In this passage, after Nurse Ratched enters the room in a typical day on the ward, Chief Bromden’s description of her as perfection is juxtaposed by his actual intention to emphasize her big flaw.

Chief Bromden begins this paragraph with the positive side of the nurse. He claims how perfect she looks with her “smooth, calculated and precision-made” face, comparing her to a “baby-doll. Chief Bromden is trying to make her look like a goddess without any faultiness in her image.

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While all these pretty dictions such as the “baby blue eyes” and the “small nose” have been used, he begins to point out her defects by inserting the word “except” and emphasizing miniscule details of her - “the color [of] her lips, her fingernails and the size of her bosom. ” This is very incongruous to her overall appearance of being a perfect human being.

Moreover, he says that Nurse Ratched is a “mistake in manufacturing,” suggesting her machine-like quality and comparing Nurse Ratched to inanimate product made in a factory.

Her “womanly breasts” with all the defects mentioned above reflect another idea. Chief Bromden suggests that “breasts,” which symbolizes womanhood, as the deformity implying her unfitness to rule over the patients in the ward despite all the other perfect qualities that she has.

Throughout the book, Kesey uses this character of Nurse Ratched to suggest how even a perfectly-looking person or in extreme, a dictator is the same human being as the oppressed with humanly defects and how the strong individual idea led him or her to have an authority over the majority of the people. Thus, the author clearly establishes the importance of individuality and nonconformity to suggest how the American government tried to get the people to conform under the unrest especially due to the protest against the involvement in the war.