twists,
             stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and
             bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery
             inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load.4.
             These metaphors continue throughout the book, and it becomes very clear that the Big Nurse does not merely represent a cog in the machine that is the Combine, but is herself the machine. She represents everything that sterile, mechanized society had to fear in the early 1950's, and in many ways, she embodied, early on, the very society that Kesey's psychedelic escapades sought to liberate people from.
             ...