Power in the Patients

For my drawings I wanted to portray the meetings that are mentioned in the book. For my drawing I split the page to show how the meetings changed before and after McMurphy started speaking up. On the before side, Nurse Ratched aka Big Nurse and the doctors are facing the patients. Nurse Ratched is drawn the biggest and the doctor slightly smaller. I drew them bigger because when I read the scene about the meetings I always saw her as the biggest person in the room because she ran the whole thing and voiced her opinions the most. I also did that because in the meetings and overall in the ward they had the most power. Power over how stuff ran and over the patients. In the book, one of the first meetings that we heard of, Nurse Ratched and the doctor did most of the talke. The doctor explains to McMurphy what they are for and Nurse Ratched did everything else. In that meeting none of the patients were speaking up and then Nurse Ractched started talking. The book states, “ That triggered something, some acoustic device in the walls, rigged to turn on at just the sound of those words coming from her mouth. The Acutes stiffened. Their mouths opened in unison. Her sweeping eyes stopped on the first man along the wall,” (pg 45). Then they went on to admit things that they did that were wrong or against the law. The Nurse seemed to scare them and she could get them to do anything she wanted. She had power to control how they acted. However, that did not stay the same throughout the book. On the after side, the patients are drawn bigger than Nurse Ratched and the doctor. I did this to represent the power shift that happens after McMurphy starts speaking up. The patients started doing things they would have never before because it goes against Nurse Ratched and the rules she set up. In the book Mcmurphy is unhappy about being the ward and the rules it has to follow so he starts trying to change it. One of the times he does that is in the meetings. In his second meeting he got the doctor to stand up for his idea of having a game room and then he started talking about random things almost like he was making fun of the meetings. He said, “Saaay, Doctor, what I been dyin’ to know is what did this dream I dreamt the other night mean” (pg 99). He took over the whole meeting and they did not talk about what they were supposed to talk about at all. The narrator of the book goes on to say, “One by one the patients are sneaking looks at her to see how she’s taking the way McMurphy is dominating the meeting, and they see the same thing,” (pg 100). Before McMurphy started speaking up, Nurse Ratched could control what was talked about and that was gone. It also did not stop with just McMurphy. In the book it says, “And that afternoon in the meeting when Cheswick said that everybody’d agreed that there should be some kind of showdown on the cigarette situation…” (pg 149). The patients would have never had the courage to stand up before and that is because Nurse Ratched was slowly starting to lose her power. The patients also started going against what Nurse Ratched said when it came to the fishing trip that McMurphy requested. This shows that the power in the ward is slowly changing from Nurse Ractched to the patients and that is what I tried to show in my drawing.