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<title> The Big Nurse- a spider in her web </title>
In this essay I am going to give a description of one of the characters in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, namely the Big Nurse's. To illustrate my points I will use the book for references and quotations.

Chief Bromden has been on the ward longer than any other patient. Only one person has been there longer and that is the Big Nurse, miss Ratched. She is a middle-aged woman with a smooth face, just like an expensive baby doll's, she has baby-blue eyes and a small nose with pink little nostrils. She is quite well preserved and probably looked good when she was younger. However there are two things that disturbs her looks. First it is the colour of her lips and finger tips. They have a funny orange colour, like the tip of a soldering iron. Then it is the size of her bosom. She has big womanly breasts and they do not at all match her personality because there is nothing womanly with her or the way she acts. This is one of the many observations that Chief Bromden has made over the years. "She is carrying her woven wicker bag. She's had it all the years I been here. It's lose weave and I can see inside it; there is no compact or lipstick or woman stuff, she's got that bag full of a thousand parts she aims to use in her duties today- wheels and gears, cogs polished to a hard glitter, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers pliers, rolls of copper wire..." (p. 10)

She used to be an army nurse in the thirties and has been on the ward ever since. Chief Bromden, the big half-Indian who pretends to be deaf and dumb has watched her over the years. He has learned how she works and what she thinks and he has watched her becoming more and more skilful, refining her methods until they are almost perfect. She has carefully chosen her staff, tried out many men, finally deciding to keep the ones that hate enough to be capable. She has taught them her own technique, not to show their hate and to be calm and she doesn't have to give them orders because they know what she expects them to do. The Big Nurse is satisfied when everything runs the way she wants it to and when she controls the situation. "I see her sit in the centre of the web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second witch wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants". (p.30)

When something disturbs her she gets real put out, but she does not show it. She just smiles her doll smile and keeps a calm cold face. Inside of her though she is furious and tense as steel. When the new patient McMurphy arrives the Big Nurse is challenged. He questions her rules and everything she does. Her work is being disturbed but she knows that she can't be beaten. Maybe she loses some battles with McMurphy but she is too big to be beaten, or like chief Bromden puts it: "She's lost a little battle here today, but it's a minor battle a big war that she's been winning and that she'll go on winning (p. 101).

The Big Nurse uses different methods to maintain her control. She keeps a logbook in the day room (p. 19) were the patients can write down if something unusual happens during the day, or if they find out something about an other patient that they think that she should know about. An other example of her control is when the men are going on the fishing trip McMurphy has arranged. She doesn't forbid them to go but she tells them about how dangerous the sea is. Everyone becomes afraid and they don't want to go fishing (p.177). This is something that is characteristic for the Big Nurse. She knows that she can win just by insinuating things. "She doesn't need to accuse. She has a genius for insinuation. Did you ever hear her, in the course of our discussion today, ever once hear her accuse me of anything? Yet it seems I have been accused of a multitude of things" Harding, one of the patients says at one occasion (p. 60).
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Though Nurse Ratched may not be the root to all the problems on the ward she sure has the ultimate power to decide what's going to happen to her patients. During the years she has managed to brainwash most of them and they don't know weather her intentions are good or bad. This has put her in a powerful situation and would probably have kept her there if it had not been for McMurphy.
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