Nurse Ratched

Here, we have our head nurse, Nurse Ratched. This former army nurse, rightfully nicknamed "Big Nurse", does not seem to have one feminine bone in her body. She has specific expectations of the patients, the staff, and of course herself. She runs the asylum with strict rules, tight schedules, appointed chores, and piercing eyes.

McMurphy rightfully pronounces her name "Rat-shed", as rats are devious, conniving, sinister little creatures that also carried the Black Plague with them back in the Medival ages. Nurse Ratched is treacherous as she manipulates the patients to spy on each other to expose each other's weaknesses to her. She treats the patients unfairly and purposely takes advantage of them out of malice.

Nurse Ratched often resides in her safe glass case, observing the workings of the asylum from the inside. This is a way she can both stay sane herself and keep order within the asylum.

Once McMurphy showed up at our asylum, Nurse Ratched knew he was going to be a handful. But surely she had no idea the hysteria that was to ensue when she and McMurphy clashed heads, including a suicide, a physical attack, a fatal lobotomy session, a murder, and finally the voluntary checking out of all the patients of the asylum.

What Nurse Ratched fails to understand was that if she took her mind off of the need to keep things orderly all the way down to the core (which could, arguably, could possibly be Nurse Ratched's mental illness), she would be able to see the beauty of the world and of the patients. If she had noticed that sooner, maybe she could have saved everyone from a whole lot of pain.

What Would Nurse Ratched Say?

- "I thought for a minute there I saw her whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don't make any difference.... To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she's won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that" (Part 1).

- "First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you're finally satisfied. Playing with human lives - gambling with human lives - as if you thought yourself to be a God!" (Part 3).

- "What she dreams of there in the centre of those wires is a world of precision efficiency and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable . . . Year by year she accumulates her ideal staff: doctors, all ages and types, come and rise up in front of her with ideas of their own about the way a ward should be run, some with backbone enough to stand behind their ideas, and she fixes these doctors with dry-ice eyes day in, day out, until they retreat with unnatural chills" (Part 1).