use. The novel is excellent at portraying the conflict between maintaining order and the need to break the control that comes with it on behalf of the individual. McMurphy questions the authority of the manipulative and controlling Nurse Ratched. He thwarts her authority every chance he gets and leads his fellow residents to follow his lead. His final rebellion is giving up his own life in order for the others to have more life. His final rebellious party involves women, drink and excitement for the other residents, but these actions have dramatic and emotional consequences as the institution officials use their full power and authority to regain control of the institution.
The biggest sociological similarity between Asylums and Cuckoo’s Nest is the attempt through disculturation, role dispossession, modification of self-regulating inner tendencies of the individual and mortification to bring into balance or wholeness the “inmate’s sense of personal inefficacy and the relation of his own desires to the ideal interests of the establishment,” (Goffman 47). However, this microcosm of the institution is to supplant the macrocosm of society which, by the resident’s institutionalization, has obviously failed to blend t
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