One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest -- First Blog

Within the first five pages of the book, Ken Kesey portrays Nurse Ratched from a mild mannered nurse to one that is read to "tear the black [workers] limb from limb... she really let's herself go and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blogs up bigger and bigger..." (5). This immediately gives the reader the impression that she is to be the villain of the novel with the violence that the narrator portrays her to have.

McMurphy seems to be the most heroic out of the characters we are introduced to within the first section of the novel. The first real introduction of McMurphy depicts him as a patient with a curable disease (an Acute) and "grinning and shaking hands with everybody he comes to," (Kesey 18) as well as depicting him laughing and winking at the narrator Chief (Kesey 24). The narrator goes on to describe a group meeting where the attending physician "is working so hard to keep from giggling again" from McMurphy's wise cracks (47). This gives him a very amiable and likable personality that the reader would most likely identify with, making him more of the hero of the novel. 

If there were to be an antihero, Chief would most likely be it. He doesn't seem very relatable to the audience with his choice to deaf and dumb, which, as the audience, we can tell he is not (24). However, the audience is gathering the story from his point of view and also sympathizing for him on the first page when the black employees are mocking him.