Presentation of Psychological Issues in The Bell Jar and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Through their knowledge of real-life situations, the authors of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Bell Jar brilliantly convey reflective messages about mental illness and the issues surrounding the condition. One can instantly draw a connection between Ken Kesey's description of the psychiatric clinic in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and his own experiences at the renowned Menlo Park Veteran's Infirmary, where he voluntarily agreed to be used as a test subject for some psychoactive drugs. The Bell Jar, written by Sylvia Plath, depicts her battle with persistent mental disease. Additionally, both writers utilize symbolism in the novels’ titles as a nod to the subject of mental illness. Kesey’s title, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has a symbolic meaning where the phrase “the Cuckoo’s Nest” represents a psychological health facility. Chief Bromden escaped from inhumane treatment in the facility by “flying out.” Cuckoo represents insanity where one can only cope using psychoactive drugs. Similarly, Plath’s The Bell Jar figuratively outlines the main protagonist’s (Esther Greenwood) current state of mind. For instance, Miss Greenwood usually feels trapped by the thoughts that torture her consciousness, thoughts regarding unhappiness and self-uncertainty, and her desire to find a way of escaping mental confines. Such entrapment is akin to being confined in a bell jar.

Firstly, indecision is a significant theme in both The Bell Jar and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Bell Jar is overly concerned with issues of entrapment and freedom. In the book, Esther attempts committing suicide numerous times and appears unable to make clear decisions on simple matters such as choosing what to eat. “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I could not make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.” In this quote, Esther admits to our lack of courage, as well as have a failure to attempt to be courageous. She is starving to death, yet she is still choosy on which figs to choose. The main character becomes soaked in the form of narcissism while trying to make the perfect decision. She mentally overwhelms herself with simple choices. In the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey also portrays Chief Bromden as a psychologically weak person who needs another person to help him cope with his mental illness. Chief initially spent most of his time detached from the external world, only connecting with it when contemplating what he heard during the day when he was playing deaf. His strength returns upon encountering McMurphy, a rebellious patient who constantly challenged Nurse Ratched’s authority.

Secondly, both The Bell Jar and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest have confinement and freedom as a theme. With this theme, Kasey and Plath hope to educate readers on how confinement can either help a mentally ill person get better, or worsen his/her situation. In The Bell Jar, the idea of confinement is present in numerous instances in the novel. Confinement includes the places where Esther visits, the hospital where she stays, and the prison at Deer Island. People in all these areas remain separated from the rest of the society because they are infections, mentally ill, or criminal.

In the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy desires freedom, and this is his only desire. The desire is one reason why he becomes so shocked that he almost falls over when he discovers that so many patients in the psychiatric ward are living there out of their own will. He fails to understand why a fully-grown person would sacrifice his freedom. His principles in life are to live by his terms and conditions and not those of other people. He becomes surprised that there are people who are willing to give up their freedom and control to others. The theme becomes prominent throughout One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. However, he believes the possibility that of people whose only mission is to bring others down. McMurphy notes that in his quote “It looks to me like everybody spends his or her whole life tearing everybody else down” (p.174). He says these words to Harding on the two are discussing Harding’s problems with his wife. However, this quote contains further meaning. McMurphy is probably referring to his own experience at the hospital. Most patients who come to the hospital are always discouraged by being frustrated psychologically into submission and acceptance that they are mentally broken. McMurphy believes that insanity begins after a person’s mentality is broken.

Madness is another theme which is common in both The Bell Jar and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Esther’s perspective in the Bell jar shows how she is experiencing and suffering from suicidal depression. However, her keen observation of the society and will force one to question whether high insanity arises as a reaction against the pressure she is experiencing from our society. One can argue that from Esther’s perspective, an insanity is merely a form of protest to this pressure. The novel also shows the inhumane practices in the hospital and how these practices influence the victims. In one instance, Esther surprised about the execution of the Rosenbergs. She is in fact shocked at the very thought of being executed saying, “The thought of being electrocuted makes me sick. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.” Here, execution is Esther’s worst nightmare that she could experience. This quote suggests that for Esther, madness is not a psychological problem. Instead, she believes people use the word madness to describe people who cannot fit within the society.

Both One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Bell Jar contains several examples of harmful ideas about sex and gender. For example, in the Bell jar, Esther narrates that:

“When I was nineteen, being pure was the great issue. Instead of the world being separated into Protestants and Catholics or Democrats and Republicans or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who had not, and this appeared as the only noteworthy difference between one person and another. I thought a great change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.” (p.90)

The quotation shows that Esther’s sexual decisions are limited in her life. Conventional wisdom prominent in her life during that time shows that she was to remain as a virgin until she was married. Choosing to have sex before marriage was not an option due to the risk of pregnancy. Taking that choice puts herself in conflict with her future husband, and significantly ruin her personality and name. The quote shows that during her teenage years, she had definite ideas about sex because pureness was essential. However, as she grew up, she would become later a world that is entirely different from what she believed in when she was young. It was a world where people were classified depending on whether one is a virgin or not. As a result, this is probably the reason why she decided to lose her virginity to a person whom she did not expect to become her future husband. Despite making this decision, Esther continues to experience challenges with her sexual identity. Men surrounding her in her life offer little to nothing in terms health. For example, Buddy believes that men and women should maintain their gender roles. However, Buddy is a transgressor because of having a sexual relationship with a waitress. Eric believes that sex is a disgusting act, and would never attempt. Marco insults Esther by calling her a slut and tries to rape her. These contrary ideas are additionally present in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For example, McMurphy argues that:

“The man has but one truly real weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter. A straightforward weapon, and with every passing year in this hip, motivationally researched society, more and more people are learning how to render that weapon useless and conquer those who have hitherto been conquerors.” (p.63)

The quote above is a discussion by McMurphy in a group meeting. Here, Kesey attempts to show the misogynistic nature of the modern world that glorifies the idea of controlling women using sex. In the group discussion, McMurphy is convincing Harding that there is almost no way of controlling women aside from using sex. McMurphy argues that men who do not do this are highly unlikely to gain control or influence over the society and that doing this requires them to use sex by raping women to become effective. Kesey notes the main problem with this argument is that women have learned this tactic and are using it against men, making McMurphy’s argument weak. Kasey emphasizes these crude ideas throughout the novel. He uses McMurphy’s bold and strange sexual ideas as a sign that McMurphy is quite sane. In one incident, McMurphy attempts to harass Ratched sexually by painting her ear when wearing at our and making sexual remarks on her breasts. McMurphy goes ahead and tears her shirt open, perhaps to show his dominance over the female and against what he explains to Harding as “The juggernaut of modern matriarchy.” Most patients in the psychiatric hospital including Billy, Chief, Harding, and McMurphy all have negative relationships with women. Kesey uses these negative relationships to show that these men are sane. When Chief becomes sexually excited, Kesey portrays him as rational. Kasey also indicates that Billy regains his manhood and confidence briefly until Ratched breaks Billy’s morale to the extent that the victim commits suicide.

Rejecting reality is another common theme between The Bell Jar and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In The Bell Jar, Esther rejects reality to an extent she feels uncertain about her abilities.

“Look what can happen in this country, they would say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she cannot afford a magazine, and then suddenly she gets a scholarship to college and wins a reward here and a reward there and ends up taking over New York like her car. Only I was not commandeering anything, not even myself. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I could not get myself to act. I felt very still and very empty inside, the way the eye of a storm must feel, moving monotonously along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” (p.61)

In this quote, Esther is rejecting being part of New York life. She feels disconnected. People surrounding her do not notice her capabilities, and makes her upset because she is gauging her performance in life with the accomplishments of others who have made it in New York. This is in contradiction to her own beliefs. Esther has worked very hard and succeeded purely out of her hard work, talent, and luck. However, she feels that others who have passed through the same struggle are getting more recognition by being part of key decision makers in New York society. As a result, she does not find anything interesting in New York. These negative thought patterns contribute to her unhappiness and depression. She believes the fashion world is disorienting and superficial, and those making headlines do not deserve it. These thoughts also contribute to her feelings of unworthiness, where she compares herself to “the eye of a tornado” and where she is surrounded by the fashion industry’s “Hullabaloo.”

The theme represents itself in One of the Cuckoo’s Nest albeit in a different way. Chief Bromden does not accept the reality that the Nurse Ratched is in control.

“I been silent so long now it is gonna roar out of me like floodwaters, and then you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have happened, this is too awful to be the truth! However, please. It is still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking about it. However, it is the truth even if it did not happen.” (p.8)

Here, Chief is displaying a sense of paranoia. He does not accept the everyday reality of events happening in the hospital. However, this quote shows that he is probably hallucinating. Although he undoubtedly rejects his reality, the difference between his rejection and Esther’s rejection is that Chief is suffering from what appears to be schizophrenia. He initially believes that a fog surrounds the whole and that the fog prevents other patients from seeing the true nature of the Big Nurse. In the quote above, one can see that his speech is disorganized and lacks social interaction or emotion. When the black boys subject him to electroshock therapy, he starts thinking “They start the fog machine again and it is snowing down cold and white all over me like skim milk.” He also pretends to be deaf so that he can listen and observe people around him. It is common for people to speak openly around deaf people. This way, Chief wants to interact with the reality while at the same time remaining district with it. Later, he decides to change from being isolated with reality to more interaction with those around him such as McMurphy. This position shows that he is accepting his immediate reality, and has learned that withdrawing from it is not the best way to create the change he wants to see.

Kesey and Plath utilize themes that offer the reader a general depiction of confinement in various mental health facilities. Furthermore, the themes The Bell Jar and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest titles identify the deficiency in understanding regarding mental illnesses. In the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Nurse Ratched gives medications to patients every morning. However, when Mr. Taber requests to be given information on the contents of his medication, the nurse declines to give this information. Instead, the nurse tells Mr. Taber that there are alternative means of taking the medication apart from taking them orally. He refused the medication after being ignored and hid from the Nurse Flinn. The black boys force Taber to take the medication, ignoring his requests for information about its contents. The book reports that Taber is raped and electro-shocked by the black boys. However, the scene contradicts Kesey’s earlier opening scene where he wrote that Taber had left the psychiatric ward before Nurse Flinn started working there. In this scene, Kesey is portraying the emotional detachment between the nurse and the patients. The theme signifies the bureaucracy common in psychiatric wards where caregivers operate using strict guidelines that are sometimes detrimental to their patients. The storytellers in the two novels appear to condemn the treatment programs approved by the therapists. Tanya Peterson asserts that the treatment programs offered to mentally ill patients were impractical when The Bell Jar got scripted. Peterson sustains that the programs were not as accurate as the ones being adopted today in most psychiatrist clinics and hospitals. Specifically, there was no precise identification of the mental health issue that characters such as Esther supposedly suffered. The lack of accuracy in the programs is an accurate description of how the society labels people with mental illnesses as having an abnormal problem, which only serves to push them away from the society. Tanya explains that “It seems more as though the doctors were trying what they could to jolt, force, and shock Esther back to the world of the sane.” Tanya’s description of what therapists did implies that the doctors had no idea what they were doing. They were just trying various treatment programs to anyone deemed insane in the confinement centers. Trying different programs may be a matter of perspective, the occurrences described in the novels are indicative of a methodological loophole within therapeutic practices. The author shows us how wrong treatment programs, that include administering an electric shock to patients such as the Chief. The manner in which Under The Bell Jar: It is Hard to Fight Insanity When You’re Depressed deals with the nursery rhyme, showing how it is impossible to expect to heal yourself from mental illness. Just like Esther, Plath struggled with her mental illness until she committed suicide. She used to cover up her condition, just like Esther, and assumed that this would help her get over it. In the detailed critique of Kesey’s book, the famous critic, John Swaine, refers to a Doctor Frank Pitman, who recognizes that the sorts of treatment programs offered during the 1960s functioned rapidly but were dangerous for the human brain. Furthermore, Swaine asserts that Kesey’s novel “also catalyzed the development of more effective antipsychotic drugs that allowed more psychiatric patients to be treated at home and live normal lives.” The above may mean that the novel’s title, Flying over the Cuckoo’s Nest, refers to the pursuit of appropriate diagnosis and treatment programs for mentally ill patients as opposed to confining patients for treatment. Additionally, the author also utilizes the term “fog” to define the sort of treatment programs offered in addition to referring to the complete ambiguity of the identification and treatment programs. The above implies that, if there were a precise identification method of mental illnesses, then not all sorts of psychological issues would be referred to as insanity.

Chief Bromden describes how the black boys whisper their secrets when near him, believing he is deaf and even goes ahead to proclaim that he is “cagey enough to fool them that much.” The manner in which Chief guards his secret against all the other characters leaves the reader with the assumption that Chief is sane most of the time, and must have only committed an act considered insane to land himself in the psychiatric ward. Similarly, Plath makes Esther have some secrets just between her and the reader. For example, when Esther intentionally pushes down the tray of thermometers that the nurse had put on the bed. Plath informs the reader that she was much aware of the act and was just pricked by, “a heavy naughtiness” To throw down the tray. The author uses the two words to show readers that, in as much as those surrounding psychiatric patients can help the patients, there could also exist others whose actions aggravate their mental health problems. In Kesey's book, Big Nurse's control over the patients worsens their psychological issues, and in The Bell Jar, some actions by Esther's mother and some of the nurses she meets at the hospitals make her mind go wild with thoughts of dissatisfaction. Chief and McMurphy inform the reader that mental health can get caused by internal pressures individuals put on themselves as well as the external influences from people close to them.

Dissimilarities in the Texts

Esther lacks the courage to express her mind and relieve herself from negative thoughts until she becomes hospitalized. However, Chief finds immediate reprieve from his mental struggles immediately informs friendship with McMurphy. Before McMurphy arrived, the big nurse Ratched had successfully maintained mechanized orderliness in the psychiatry ward. Chief notes that the purpose of this orderliness is none other than “fixing up mistakes.” He further notes that “when a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes.” Here, Chief implies that life only favors people who conform to societal rules, failure to which one pays a hefty price.

The distinction of mental illness in Plath's book and Kesey's novel lies in Kesey's way of putting an invisible line between insanity and sanity. In fact, after reading the whole book on the cuckoo's nest, one is left questioning whether the mentally ill patients in the psychiatric ward were the ones with mental illness or whether the Big Nurse is the one who is insane. The analogy is in the way the writers pick a specific gender and use it to communicate issues of mental illness, with Plath utilizing the female and Kesey using the male gender respectively. The difference is in the opposites of the two sexes, and the manner in which madness gets presented. Unlike Plath who gives accounts of Esther and other female psychiatric patients in the hospital, Kesey politicizes madness in a mental ward. Kesey conveys that the admission of McMurphy into the hospital, and the how the Big Nurse treats McMurphy as a form of insanity from the nurse. Here, Kesey is showing that rational acts may appear irrational to a victim. The author is possibly trying to convey to the audience that normal behavior of sane people may appear as insane to those who are mentally ill. Gregory Shafer describes McMurphy as a soft and outspoken person who is not afraid to question everything. When McMurphy questions the treatment given to him, the nurse interprets this as insanity and ensures McMurphy takes the medication while subdued. One can argue that McMurphy’s behavior is sane, and the treatment he gets is insane. In other words, the people with a mental health condition have accepted to act insane and follow the rules of Big Nurse. That point is affirmed by Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye, through the characterization of Holden whose rejection of the laws and norms of the society gets interpreted as madness. Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya sees Holden's trauma as a result of the observation of traditions, rules, and standards by adults in the society, which inhibits the recognition of hypocrisy, self-deception, and honesty.

Apart from the questioning of sanity and insanity in the society, the characterization used by Kesey presents mental illness as a problem unknowingly experienced by all members of the community. The hate talk by inmates in the psychiatric ward is evidence that the inmates do not like the place and the treatment. However, Kesey makes psychiatric patients accept the life in the mental health ward as a way of showing the reader that mental illness can affect anyone. For the case of the inmates, most of them have accepted they are mentally ill including McMurphy who on the pretext of having psychosis, ends up not recovering from the illness. Plath, on the other hand, draws a line between the psychiatric patients and the ordinary people in her novel. For example, after Esther’s attempts to commit suicide, she tells the reader that people who came to see her probably only want to have a closer look at a girl who possibly had a mental condition. In the same way, Kaysen has a clear-cut line between the female psychiatric patients and the other people, especially the doctors and nurses. Furthermore, Kaysen's ending with the characters who were once healthy psychological patients living healthy lives, and having families bring out the difference between sanity and insanity.

Conclusion

In summary, the writers structured the stories using similar literary techniques inform readers on what mental illness affects someone. The central themes in the two books show that psychiatrists have the ability to improve or worsen their patients’ mental health by offering a supporting mental health environment. Besides, the authors efficiently use metaphors and imagery to represent essential facts about mental health problems such as the effect of confinement and intimidation, and the desire to get a proper diagnosis and effective treatment. An especially exciting supposition made by the authors is that mental illness does not imply that the patient wholly dysfunctional but instead traps them in a state from which there is a constant struggle for freedom. Psychiatrists can use this idea to reconstruct the approach taken to psychiatric treatment. The idea has the potential to grow clinical psychiatry as a profession. Salinger and Kesey also use similar literary techniques to discuss psychological problems. Despite the slight difference in the presentation of sanity and insanity, all the four writers express their belief in the possibility of ending mental health problems through effective treatment methods.

References

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