Nurse Ratched

"The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine."

- Nurse Ratched

Nurse Mildred Ratched is the primary antagonist of the book and movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. She is the head nurse at the mental institution that she works. According to the American Film Institute, she was named the number five movie villain of all time.

Personality
She is a cruel, sadistic, passive-aggressive tyrant in the institution she works in. She is helped by three black men and her fellow nurses. She plans everything that happens down to the second and whenever somebody challenges that, such as the new man on the ward, Randle 'Mac' McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), she loses her cool. When things don't go the head nurse's way, she will just say no and exert her authority over the ward inmates who have no control over her and her security guards/henchmen.

Role in the Story
In the book and movie, Nurse Mildred Ratched rules her ward with a supposedly caring iron fist. She wields supreme power over administration over medication, meaning how much they get and when, but she also controls food, toiletries, and water, and if anyone displeases her she can and will revoke these rights. She often orders the more sane patients with mental disorders go to 'therapy' sessions with her every day. There they sit around in a circle and answer any question she asks them, usually ones that are incredibly uncomfortable for them. This ploy allows her to humiliate them into staying in order and not fighting back. One particular patient, the poor, stuttering and suicidal Billy Bibbit, has been terrified into submission, making him her virtual, unwilling, slave.

However, her totalitarian rule over the ward began to slip with the arrival of not-so nuts patient, Randle McMurphy. He undermines her ridiculous rules and insists that the other patients on the ward to start acting the way they want to and stop bowing down to her. She naturally does everything she can to stop him, starting with threats and minor punishments, then leading to electro-shock therapy. None of these are, however, good enough to stop him, really only fueling his rebellious attitude.

Then, one night, McMurphy pulls the biggest blow against Ratched as he can muster. He lets the other ward people out of their rooms and gives them their cigarettes and alcohol back. Then he sneaks in two prostitute girlfriends of his and asks one of them to sleep with Billy. The next morning, when Ratched arrives, she finds her normally neat and orderly ward a mess, patients asleep on the ground, glasses of alcohol of all varities strewn about on the floor. She orders her guards to clean up and get the patients to their rooms when another nurse discovers Billy and the woman asleep in a bed.

Nurse Ratched threatens to tell Billy's mother, whom he is more afraid of than Ratched if he doesn't get back in line and start licking her boots again. Billy, terrified of either happening, kills himself. Randle is so mad he flies forward in a fit of rage and begins strangling her, but he is knocked off of her by one of her guards. Seen later she now has a neck brace and speeks in a thin, reedy voice. Later, a ward mate who has been nicknamed Chief finds out that Ratched had McMurphy get a frontal lobotomy, so as to keep him from acting up ever again. Chief knows that Randle would never want to live like this, so he suffocates him with a pillow and brings back Randle's old plan. He picks up a sink, throws it out the window facing a huge green plain and runs, with another ward mate cheering him on.

However, she lost her cruel voice and her chances to control anyone ever again.

Symbolism
It has been said that Ratched symbolises the corruption power can bring, but it has been hinted that she actually symbolises how institutes are run.