The Great Nations of Europe

What examples from the song are ironic?  
This song is full of irony. Some examples of irony is when it says: "They got tb and typhoid and athletes foot, diphtheria and the flu
'scuse me great nations comin through." (18-19) It's ironic because you wouldn't expect great nations to carry such terrible diseases.

How can you tell? 
The parts where irony is present are when the description of the nations doesn't match something you would see in a great nation.

What examples are not ironic?  
The descriptions that do match a great nation or whatever its talking about, like "and now they wanted more," (2), but there are very little things that are not ironic. 

How can you tell?
It isn't ironic when they tell the truth, irony bends the truth and tells lies as if they were true. 

Confused

The character that is Billy Bibbit is an enigma. At first he seemed like he was a submissive and weak man who liked to be left alone and didn't like to be the center of attention. His constant stutter made him look like an insecure manchild who never had many friends and has always been overprotected by his mother his whole life. But toward the end of the book, all of this changed, or maybe it was left in the back of his mind. 

He began to speak up more often and share his thoughts, even after being practically destroyed by Nurse Ratched in the group therapy. He is often found around the other patients, especially McMurphy and Harding, and they become good friends. That is when Billy starts to quickly change to fit in with the more outgoing patients. He agrees to going on the fishing trip, something he would have seriously doubted before, and using his natural boyish charm he picks up one of the prostitutes and invites her to the ward another day. But the real shocking decision he made, driven by his original personality, was to commit suicide due to the pressure Nurse Ratched put on him by threatening to tell his mother about his night with Candy. He clearly couldn't handle the thought of his mother knowing he was with a woman; this shows he certainly has some maternal issues. He let McMurphy and the others carry him away and make him take bad decisions, and he couldn't deal with the consequences. This was the big change Billy went through throughout the book: he assumed great power, but didn't take great responsibility. 

Women's Comparison

The role of women has been changing ever since humanity has existed. At some point in time, they were  stay at home mothers and didn't have much voice in society; they were very oppressed by men. Nowadays, women are free to do whatever they want and have slowly but surely gained their right as citizens and demonstrated they are equally capable than men. A big theme in OFOCN is the role of women, which is represented in a comical and exaggerated way in many of today's art, especially in movies. 

The period where the story is set is a transition period for women, and Kesey knew it well. WW2 had just ended, and when men were just returning from Europe feeling all empowered, women had felt equally as strong in the homefront. They worked in factories and production lines to replace those male workers that left for the war; this was very important in their race for equality, as they noticed they were as capable as men in everything. They tried to adopt new roles in society other than being housewives, and this is represented in the book. 

Women nowadays are represented comically as controlling and manipulative, and where we see this new role as effective members of society and imposing persons most is in movies. For example, I remember this case in the movie Daddy Day Care: Eddie Murphy's character is overshadowed by his wife, who is a successful businesswoman and an excellent mom, and Murphy just lost his job and is pressured by her wife to do something in order to gain money and help her with their son at the same time. After he sets up a day care for his son in his own home, we can see that the traditional roles of men and women are inverted in this movie. The wife worked out of the house and Eddie Murphy took care of their house and their son. 

The author, through Ms. Ratched, portrays this new role of women perfectly. In a time where this new image of the female gender hadn't developed fully, Kesey shows Ms. Ratched as a strong and demanding character. She manages her staff with certain toughness and constantly demerits her patients, which can be an interpretation of her being controlling and spiteful. Also, the contrast with the other nurse, the one with the birth mark on her neck, puts Ms. Ratched as a new breed of females ready to take on the world.