Ken Kesey and J.K. Rowling are two highly successful and highly different authors. Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest takes us to a bleak, depressing insane asylum in Oregon, while Rowling’s Harry Potter series whisks us off to a secretly magical Great Britain, where wizards and witches are educated far from prying Muggle eyes. Although the tales are distinctly individual, two characters from the books have striking similarities – Nurse Ratched and Professor Dolores Jane Umbridge. Despite there being some minor differences as well, their grand parallels are far more apparent.
Nurse Ratched, gravely known as the “Big Nurse” on the ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is, for lack of a better term, a megalomaniac. She has an intense lust for power and has made it her life’s work to dominate weak, hurting men in an asylum. Professor Umbridge is also a witch, but in a more literal sense. She fills in as the Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and enjoys terrorizing and bullying children in the classroom.
The characters’ similarities start even at the name; while “Nurse Ratched” and “Dolores Umbridge” sound nothing alike, both names have negative connotations. The word “dolorous” is an adjective meaning “causing pain or sorrow,” and “umbrage” has all kinds of meanings: offense, annoyance, displeasure, suspicion, doubt, or hostility. Ratched sounds like “wretched” or “ratchet,” a name that links her to the reader’s negative feelings and, interestingly, to the narrator Bromden’s metaphor of the Combine. The Combine Bromden refers to is representative of the outside world, but in real life a combine is a machine that grinds up and spits out crops, separating the good from the bad. Connecting the Big Nurse’s name in the reader’s mind with a mechanic’s tool makes her literally seem like a tool of the Combine (McMahan). Therefore, the Big Nurse’s job at the ward is to “fix” the men and make them compatible with...