Time Period Relevance

The process of reading a novel as symbolic as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest brings out a few questions about the way comparisons are made throughout the story. For example, Chief insists in comparing human beings to machines, which brings out questions like what does the time period of the book have to do with this comparison? 

            Time after a war as important and scarring to history as World War II brings out questions of feeling and meaning to the human mind, and perhaps that is what Chief means when comparing human beings to machines is precisely that: what is a person really worth in the long run, and how does something like this war turn us humans into nothing more than machines? A war does nothing much except turn family men into slaughter machines, and hurting the ones close to them when they die. So Chief’s intention to turning people into machines when they are doing a harsh action, or acting robotically might be a way of showing readers how easily a human being that is in fact a feeling organism, can turn into a non-sentimental machine when something like a war, or in this case a mental hospital neglects the world there is outside.  

            In conclusion, Kesey makes Chief in the novel is turn humans into machines because he wants to mirror the actions of men when they are put in extreme circumstances. How they forget who they are, that they have values and things they stand for, and become terrible objects of destruction. Thus, proving that time period in a novel matters, and that the elements of literature that are being compared in the novel must be relevant and precise. The machine example probably wouldn’t have mattered as much in a time like this.