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<title> The Defeat of Nurse Ratched </title>
The character whom I find most interesting in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is Nurse Ratched. It is interesting to throughout the book discover what is behind her cool façade. 
	The narrator's first description of Ratched is about her coolness and he describes her matching orange lipstick and nailpolish as a "Color so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can't tell which" (p 10). I think that is a good description of her. On one hand her appearance is feminine and pleasant with her pretty dollface and large bosom. On the other hand she seems to be cold and lack affective emotions, but not in a blunt way. Her most powerful weapon is that she always smiles and speaks in a calm and gentle tone. Nobody can ever say she loses her temper or directly accuses anyone for anything. Instead she insinuates; as Harding describes "She doesn't need to accuse. She has a genius for insinuation" (p 60). In the Group Meetings she is, in some powerful way, able to make the inmates feel unsure about themselves and even start accusing each other. At one meeting she asks the Acutes to let out their secrets, but no one dares. After sitting in silence for twenty minutes they are starting to confess things they have not even done and trying to outdo each other. This happened without her accusing someone directly and the outcome filled her with contentment. 

She is very skilful in the act of getting the Acutes where she wants them, and she does not have anything to lose, since she has all the power. If she wants to get rid of someone, all she has to do is provoke him to the point where he loses his temper and she gets a reason to send him to the Disturbes ward, the Shock Shop or even to give him a lobotomy. I think this power soothes her and she gets an inferior respect from the inmates.

The absolute power she has obtained over the years decreases when McMurphy is being committed to the ward. He takes up a psychological struggle with her and his goal is to break her down. In the beginning she is not worried about his provocative behaviour, since the power is in her hands, and she seems enticed by his challenge. But that soon changes. 

The first time she drops her guard is when McMurphy is standing in the hall wearing nothing but a towel. That was not anything she expected, so she loses her cold smile for a while, but not for long. It seems as if she grows stronger every time she loses a battle; Chief Bromden states "She don't lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet" (p 101). 

One big advantage Nurse Ratched has is that she can hide behind the rules. She controls the inmates for example by having the same schedule every week; and when the Acutes wants to watch the World Series on TV, ward policy says it has to be a majority decicion including the Chronics. Then all the Acutes follow McMurphy in demonstration and sit in front of the empty TV screen, because of being denied to watch the baseball game. It is the first time the Acutes go against her as well, and she is furious and screams at everyone. This is one of the two times she completely loses her face.

Despite the TV-event, she does not want to send McMurphy away to avoid him becoming a martyr to the others. She wants the satisfaction of breaking him down in front of the other inmates. As a first step she takes away their only privilege of being together in private in the tub room in order to get them back under her full supervision. Then she tries to turn everyone against McMurphy, but those efforts are in vain. When he is away on his shock treatments, his absence give the others an opportunity to glorify him. After the night of McMurphy's unsuccessful escape attempt when everybody had turned against her she felt defeated, and to regain her strength she breaks Billy down in front of the others leading to his suicide. When McMurphy gets furious and batters Ratched, she actually becomes frightened of him. That is the second time she loses her face.

It may seem like she won the war against McMurphy when he is given a lobotomy, but in a way she is the loser when most of the Acutes sign themselves out, mentally strengthened by McMurphy's stay on the ward. And she never did get the satisfaction of breaking McMurphy down.
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