In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest written by Ken Kesey in 1962, you have to choose sides. This book showed power struggle in every sense of the phrase. At the time this book was written, race and gender determined where you were on the social pyramid. Here is a book, where in a certain mental asylum, the woman was in charge and the blacks harassed the whites. Almost an inverted reality for the time period.
The head person in charge was a woman, known as the Big Nurse. She was constantly being compared to machines with their precision and monotony. SHe was as Kesey described "in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot" (29). She kept everything neat and had "gotten more and more skillful over the years" (Kesey 28). She held a power within the asylum "that extended in all direction on hairlike wires" (Kesey 29). She had the most obedient workers. Everyone respected her did as she said.
The 3 janitors the Big Nurse had working for her were black. Most of the residents were white and none were identified to be black. The janitors were looked upon as law enforcers but they actually mistreated the patients. They were said to have "swatted the backs of their legs to hurry them past" (Kesey 3). They were not stopped because they were not stopped because they were of higher authority than the patients.
This book showed a perspective where you have no power. In that position, you would've understood how women and blacks felt at the time the book written. They were controlled, abused, and had no control of their surroundings. This book had shown the current reality, but the roles were reversed.
