I had no idea where to begin with my spatial representation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I looked at A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods to find an idea, and when I came across it, my brain literally fired so many connections and ideas about the structure of the story. The Cycle Diagram method seemed most appealing, because my immediate connection was the cycles Nurse Ratched tries to impose upon her ward, that is, before R.P. McMurphy arrives on the scene and breaks her vicious cycle of control.
The first image is the dormitory, where the lights either turn on or off at a specific time. By manipulating the ward’s sleep cycles, Nurse Ratched can control their schedules of activity. In the second frame of the cycle, her control intensifies to her personal monitoring of the day room through the glass panel, to ensure that no one acts up against her steely command from a removed and secure position. Her oppression encompasses their every movement throughout the day.
The third frame reflects Nurse Ratched’s control over the ward’s relationships through the daily meeting. Again from her separated nurse’s station, she manipulates the ward into degrading each other and isolating each Acute on the ward from the others in a small way. To satisfy the ward and keep them marginally happy, Nurse Ratched allows them an excursion to the pool every once and a while. This suppresses any disapproval from the ward by giving them a little positive reinforcement for the way the ward operates, and the cycle would repeat itself if Randle P. McMurphy did not come onto the ward and show them what real self-control and free will is like.
McMurphy progressively demonstrates free will and denies Nurse Ratched’s attempts to control him throughout the story, and it all culminates in the picturesque fishing trip the Acutes and Bromden take without her. The ease and repose of this trip contrasts the control and anxiety present in the ward, and it gives the Acutes a taste of what life really is.
I also realized that the level of detail in my representation of the ward and the fishing trip reflects the fullness of life experienced in the ward and beyond its walls. The routine Nurse Ratched imposes restricts the patients from living to the full extent that they could, illness or no, I concluded from my cycle diagram of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Cycle Diagram of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
