One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
            
             Character Analysis: Nurse Ratched
            
             The infamous Nurse Ratched; the patient's evil overlord and McMurphy's archrival. Big Nurse, as described by Chief, is compared to enamel, branded a "ball-cutter", "buzzard", and "bitch", and feared so much that not a single patient has the courage to stand against her. This is until McMurphy appears.
            
             Nurse Ratched could quite easily be described in two words: sadistic Megalomaniac. She not only has the sub-conscious urge to control the patients in her ward, but also takes pleasure in doing so. Her character could represent an ultimate evil, a manipulative, cunning entity that can cut the qualities of a person down and drive them to self-despise. She is also interpreted as invincible, an unbeatable antagonist with no emotions, or ones for other human beings for that matter.
            
             Ratched quite closely resembles the words "wretched" and "hatchet", two of which she could be compared to. In many ways she is a hatchet, hewing the patients down at the knees through emotional damage. She does this mostly through the group meetings where furtively, she brings up personal issues about the patients and "discusses" them; knowing perfectly well that they will degrade and upset the patient. However, through this astute process she manages to gain "back-up" from the other patients so they join in on the attack. When this occurs, McMurphy describes the men as chickens; ganging up and pecking at the scent of blood. There are a few reasons the other patients may do this. One is by the old saying, "Can't beat them, join them", where the patients help Big Nurse in hope to receive her liking. Another is that the patients attack the exposed so that attention would not be drawn to them, and that they themselves would not be attacked.
            
             Nurse Ratched disdains men in general, and this is d...