Randall Patrick McMurphy |
Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, extends Arthur Miller’s thesis through rebel character and tragic hero Randall Patrick McMurphy. In Miller’s essay he explains a tragic hero is “a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense of personal dignity” (Miller1). McMurphy extends this claim because he was ready to not only lay down his own life for his dignity, but also for the dignity of the other men on the ward. McMurphy possesses every quality Miller describes a tragic hero has and he also takes it a step further by becoming a tragic hero for the men as well. Another characteristic of a tragic hero Miller describes is that a tragic hero has an “underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of who and what we are in this world” (Miller 2). McMurphy shows this quality when he gives up on trying to rebel against Nurse Ratched because he realizes his fate is in her hands and he is scared of being displaced, but he tears himself from his image of a rebel. He realized she decides when he’s released, goes to the Disturbed wing, or the shock shop (Kesey 174). Miller continues to describe today’s modern tragedy by saying “Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom” (Miller 2). McMurphy is made out to be the hero who is leading the men in a rebellion in part one of the novel, but in part 2 he backs down when he realizes he was doing the opposite: threatening their freedom and life on the ward had become even more restricted. Chief Bromden described the situation on the ward, “I’m just getting the full force of the dangers we let ourselves in for when we let McMurphy lure us out of the fog” (Kesey 150). To top off McMurphy’s tragic tale, he ended up worse in the end, just as a tragic does. Randall Patrick McMurphy ended up dying in the midst of his rebellion against Nurse Ratched. Therefore, McMurphy is a true tragic hero.
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Another character who embodies the characteristics of a tragic hero is Jay Gatsby: