One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest What Page Does Chief Feel Big Again
The Phantom on the Ward: An Culling View of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Review by Matthew Wade Thomas
1 Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Ken Kesey.
Faber. 2019. 395 pp.
Berkley Press. 1963. 272 pp.
ISBN 978-0451163967.
The story is introduced past the psychotic patient Chief Bromden. Bromden identifies his medical nomenclature as Chronic, meaning he is only being managed past the hospital staff with petty expectation of recovery and release, and the tale is told through his optics. Bromden'due south mental condition impacts his perception, distorting both what he observes and how he comprehends the world at large. He suffers breaks with reality during which he hallucinates and impairment of his cognitive abilities when he is continued. As the narrator of the book, Bromden appears to be outside the action observing and reporting to the reader. However, as the story progresses, he becomes interpreter also, lending sense and meaning to events, and past the end of the book it is articulate that he is the chief grapheme.
Bromden's primary adversary is modern social club, which he refers to as "the Combine," a designation he gives it because he sees the mod globe equally a consortium of societal and governmental forces whose goal is to suppress individuality, corrupt humanity and degrade nature through mechanized, unnatural means. In his eyes the Combine is at work everywhere, particularly on the ward, where the hospital staff acts equally frontline soldiers mindlessly carrying out their agenda to subdue and devitalize the patients.
After being shown to be a narrator who is not merely unreliable only unrealistic, Bromden initiates the story by maxim (7-viii):
It's gonna burn me just that way, finally telling well-nigh all this, virtually the infirmary, most her, and the guys—and well-nigh McMurphy. I been silent so long at present it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you call back the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you recollect this is too horrible to have really happened, this is also awful to be the truth! Just, please. It's still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. Merely information technology'south the truth even if it didn't happen. (italics mine)
How literally to have this opening is the question, and it presents a major result to be resolved from the start. Like a crossroad, the direction the reader takes at this early juncture determines how to view the ensuing events. If the argument is not to exist taken literally, then why take the residuum of the story literally? If the statement is true, it calls the reality of the story into question and frames it equally a fable with none of information technology existence real, just instead a figment of Bromden'due south imagination conjured up for his own purposes.
Similar Alice, the reader goes "down the rabbit hole" very early on seeing alternative ways to sympathize the novel. Without a tether to objectivity the reader is lost in a forest of possible interpretations. And all the same the story was written without such a tether. Kesey challenges the reader to question more than the order, structure and authority of club: he is demanding the reader question perception itself—facts and their interpretation. As the narrator, Bromden is responsible for giving the facts of the story, but he as well acts as interpreter offering an understanding of their significant and significance, and the two roles are quite different. If the story is not factual, why create and relate it? Was Bromden committed, using the story of McMurphy as a manner of bringing himself out of his crippling mental illness, or was he never actually in a mental hospital at all? Or is the source Bromden himself: did he invent the saga to give value and vocalization to his own by? With an unrealistic narrator both facts and pregnant are suspect.
Every bit before long equally McMurphy arrives the reader is reminded how tenuous the validity of the narrative about to unfold is when Nurse Ratched reminds Nurse Flinn (26):
"Yous seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane."
A classic writer'due south convention: Kesey talking to the reader, waving a red flag, and pointing out that these men are insane, particularly the narrator.
When McMurphy enters the story, Bromden hears but does not come across him (10):
Just this morning I accept to sit down in the chair and just listen to them bring him in. Still, fifty-fifty though I can't see him, I know he's no ordinary Access.
This is the first time Bromden is non the initial human on the ward to see a new admission. He has had a psychotic occurrence and is strapped to a chair in the mean solar day room heavily medicated. It is unclear if the psychotic outcome has ended or what outcome the medication has had on him, leaving open the possibility that Bromden is nevertheless in the throes of the episode (or his medication) and nothing in the book from this indicate on is anything but a hallucination. And even though he has not yet met or fifty-fifty seen McMurphy, he immediately presents him as superior to the others on the ward, an extraordinary individual with mythic stature (10):
He sounds like he's fashion above them, talking down, similar he'due south sailing 50 yards overhead, hollering at those below on the footing. He sounds big. I hear him coming downwardly the hall, and he sounds large in the way he walks, and he certain don't slide; he'south got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes.
McMurphy likewise is uncommonly insightful with knowledge of Bromden no one else has: he is the only one who does not take Bromden'south deaf and mute deed; equally before long as they see, McMurphy knows Bromden can hear and speak. Non even the medical professionals in the infirmary realize this. Truly, McMurphy is remarkable if non outright superhuman (twenty):
Nobody like him's ever been on the ward earlier.
And it seems more than than coincidental that just as McMurphy supposedly appears on the ward, Bromden has reached the point of giving up and retreating into the fog, possibly for good, the ultimate capitulation to the Combine. McMurphy's inflow causes him to interruption if for no other reason than curiosity (39):
One of these days I'll quit straining and permit myself get completely, lose myself in the fog the way some of the other Chronics have, but for the fourth dimension being I'one thousand interested in this new homo—I desire to see how he takes to the Group Meeting coming upward.
The group meeting is where the McMurphy mythos begins in earnest with him acting out and giving vent to Bromden's frustration at his own passivity, impotence and surrender. McMurphy does not, however, participate in the discussion of the men'south psychological bug. He is nevertheless appraising the situation according to Bromden, who explains McMurphy's reticence with curious intuition (46-47):
McMurphy sits frontwards in his chair a couple of times during the meeting similar he might have something to say, simply he decides better and leans back. There's a puzzled expression coming over his face. Something foreign is going on here, he'south finding out. He tin can't quite put his finger on information technology. Like the fashion nobody will laugh. Now he thought sure there would be a laugh when he asked Ruckly, "Whose wife?" but in that location wasn't even a sign of one. The air is pressed in past walls, too tight for laughing. There's something strange near a place where the men won't let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that grinning flour-faced former mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. And he thinks he'll just expect a while to run across what the story is in this new place earlier he makes any kind of play. That'south a skilful rule for a smart gambler: look the game over awhile before yous draw yourself a manus.
Bromden goes from recounting the story, watching McMurphy and reading him the style any observant person would, to becoming an omniscient narrator stating what McMurphy is thinking. And these two pieces of narration are connected by Bromden interjecting his own interpretation of what is happening on the ward. Strikingly Bromden entwines McMurphy, himself, and his own unique accept on events into i single complect.
At the very beginning Bromden conveys the business relationship of McMurphy with astuteness beyond his role as narrator or fifty-fifty interpreter. Bromden exhibits an acumen concerning McMurphy that implies a knowledge and insight closer to that of composer than observer. This is telling, and would make sense if Bromden is creating the character of McMurphy equally the story develops, conveying, explaining, and defining him, weaving him from the fabric of his ain psyche.
When the group coming together is over, later the men are washed "tearing into poor Harding" (53) and they disperse, McMurphy and Harding see each other face to face for the first time, and all the same (54):
Each man seems unaware of the other. I can't fifty-fifty tell if Harding's noticed McMurphy at all.
After a group coming together where McMurphy is introduced and sweeps everyone into the vortex of his powerful personality and Harding is humiliated over his relationship with his wife, they are unaware of each other? This meeting is fundamental to the progression of the story. Information technology is essential to Bromden that Harding interacts with his fantasy, because Harding is the vox of reason—intelligent and educated—the intellectual amidst the men. He educates McMurphy on the way things piece of work on the ward and by extension club. Harding's rationalism contrasts Bromden's fantastical view of the world. Harding is on the ward for behavioral reasons (he had trouble adjusting on the outside); he is non cognitively impaired like Bromden, who clearly has issues with perception. Harding's viewpoint provides a necessary contraposition to Bromden's, and McMurphy'due south interaction with Harding validates McMurphy, in Bromden's mind, among the men on the ward. It is McMurphy who initiates the first meeting with Harding and begins their clan—near as though Bromden pushes McMurphy at Harding, and Harding has no choice simply to respond, drawing him to the McMurphy mirage (55):
Harding's head turns with a jerk and his eyes detect McMurphy, like information technology's the first time he knows that anybody'southward sitting in front of him.
Harding and McMurphy come to complement each other every bit exercise Harding and Bromden after in the book when Bromden no longer needs McMurphy and takes his place equally Harding's counterpart. Merely at first, Harding does not even see McMurphy.
Every bit McMurphy begins to take control of the ward, he candidly tells the men who he is and what his intentions are (78):
"The hugger-mugger of existence a superlative-notch con human is being able to know what the marker wants, and how to make him retrieve he'southward getting it."
"And what I deduce yous marks need is a big fatty pot to temptate you... Hey-yah, comin' at y'all, guts ball from hither on out..."
A con and a fantasy piece of work the same way: each is designed to fit the specific situation and meet the needs of the one who devises information technology. McMurphy does just that, giving Bromden and the men on the ward what they need—a chance at the fat pot. Only this pot is not cigarettes and coin, it is manhood, self-esteem and control. And from here on out the illusion of McMurphy, the brazen con creative person dangling the fat pot before the men, plays itself out with the men falling for his schemes. According to Bromden the reason the men succumb to McMurphy's guile is they run into him as a hero the likes of which no i has always seen on or off the ward (89):
Just the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside.
Bromden'due south description of the men'south awe of McMurphy handily fits his portrayal of McMurphy. Bromden attributes to mentally ill men whose thoughts he is not privy to the reasons they accept McMurphy every bit Bromden assembles the storyline from the perspective of both the principal character (McMurphy) and the peripheral characters (the men on the ward) like any author would. And yet every bit someone unsure of his own mental acuity, he simultaneously questions the reality of what he sees; the night Blastic dies, for instance, Bromden witnesses it all, explains what he sees with his tainted perception, and so poses the quintessential hallucinator'due south question (87):
But if they don't exist, how can a human see them?
Bromden has complete control over the grapheme and story of McMurphy. He shapes them to fit his needs both firsthand and long-term. McMurphy perfectly fulfills the necessary requirements for a surrogate to confront the Combine by proxy until Bromden regains his "size" and is able to leave the hospital: McMurphy is white (Bromden learned through his father's feel a Native American cannot win against the Combine); he is a scarred bar fighter and street brawler (to fight against a colossal enemy); he is a psychopath (completely exterior the Combine with no connections to it); he is not married and has no family (no familial or tribal responsibilities); he is an creative person, painting pictures and writing in a beautiful paw (inventiveness giving him an reward over the Combine); he is a confident, successful gambler (to accept on the Combine is a huge gamble for enormous stakes—the fat pot of freedom and manhood); he is a sexual powerhouse (to confront "Mother" Ratched and her emasculating tactics); just most chiefly, as a non-living entity, a character made-up and fitted for this job, he has admittedly cipher to lose; Bromden tin button McMurphy at the Combine without regard for his welfare. McMurphy has no hereafter except to be destroyed by the Combine, a sacrificial lamb to salvage the men on the ward (if they are willing) and free Bromden—foreshadowed by the "dead human's paw" (aces and eights) tattooed on McMurphy's shoulder.
McMurphy besides seems to be a composite of the men on the ward: he has the artistic easily that expose Harding's struggle with his sexuality; the sensitivity that keeps Billy Bibbit nether the control of his mother; the size that Bromden lost and desperately wants to regain; the willingness to disrupt the ward that got Taber crushed by Nurse Ratched; and past late in the story every bit his fight with the orderlies begins, he has become tired to the point of burnout like Pete. McMurphy's characteristics are forged by and imprinted with the need of the men on the ward.
Dr. Spivey, as well, is a bellwether for McMurphy's existence. From the first grouping meeting where McMurphy is present, Dr. Spivey falls under the spell of the classic charming psychopath. As an experienced psychiatrist, he would conspicuously run across what McMurphy is, a ward manipulator, every bit Nurse Ratched does and not succumb to his wiles. He goes so far as to become one of the men during the angling trip, while McMurphy steals the gunkhole and runs the trip the manner he runs the gambling on the ward. And when the men render with the boat, Dr. Spivey leaps to the fore and defends McMurphy saving him from any consequences including possible criminal charges.
It is highly unlikely Dr. Spivey would fall for McMurphy'south ploys, especially to the extent of becoming part of one similar he does on the angling trip. He does provide, however, a critical counterpoint to Nurse Ratched, being used by Bromden to confirm his creation amid the infirmary staff. By the fourth dimension McMurphy is on the Disturbed ward getting electric daze treatment, Dr. Spivey appears with Nurse Ratched, the two in agreement, authorizing the treatments for McMurphy, all of which Bromden claims to witness in a moment of lucidity when returning to consciousness after his daze therapy. And Dr. Spivey'south refusal to accept any responsibility for Billy Bibbit's decease, rejecting the need that he resign, suggests the possibility that Billy may have killed himself for reasons not continued with McMurphy's involvement, given that Dr. Spivey, as supervising physician, would conspicuously be responsible if McMurphy were a real patient and been allowed the leeway he had on the ward against the amend judgment of a highly-respected professional like Nurse Ratched.
From the moment Bromden becomes aware of McMurphy, he identifies him with his own begetter, and this is a recurring theme. The similarities betwixt the two men are remarkable: both are physically large (Papa alpine—his Native American name is Tee Ah Millatoona, the Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mount—and McMurphy broad); both are big personalities (approachable, boisterous and unafraid); both are leaders (Papa a Chief, McMurphy the "Balderdash Goose Loony" on the ward); both are from cultures outside of modern social club (Papa the full-blooded Columbia Native American, McMurphy a psychopath who fights and fornicates too much); both are sapped by relationships with women (Papa by his white wife whose last proper name he takes, McMurphy by Big Nurse); both take on the Combine straight (Papa past initially trying to stop the sale of tribal lands for the hydroelectric dam, McMurphy by undermining social club on the ward). And while the grade of their lives parallels each other, the most compelling trait they share is the fateful way they come to their finish—both destroyed at the hands of the Combine. The means McMurphy and Bromden's father are alike are across coincidence and a normal comparison of two split up men from such disparate cultures and backgrounds.
The correlation between the 2 is deeply significant and explains Bromden'due south situation and mindset, shaping his view of the world at big and how he interprets events on the ward. Bromden is in the hospital because he is overcome past the fog after his male parent is destroyed past the Combine; it is the McMurphy illusion that gets Bromden out, providing cover while he becomes big once again and releasing him from the fog to escape. Like a ghost Bromden'south father haunts him, until McMurphy, a wraith himself, brings Bromden back to life and sets him costless.
The differences betwixt Bromden's father and McMurphy are advantages that give McMurphy a better chance to survive a skirmish with the relentless Combine, i.e., being white and having no family unit ties. Fifty-fifty being a drinker but not an alcoholic is helpful, because it gives McMurphy the joy and release of liquor without the dissipation and enslavement of addiction. Just are these disparities improvements: are they the result of Bromden correcting the weaknesses that caused his male parent to neglect in an attempt to create a more suitable protagonist to war with the Combine? Since McMurphy does not neglect—he wins his battle, bringing Bromden and the men on the ward a triumph over the Combine Bromden's father was unable to achieve for his people—it remains a compelling possibility, and would explain McMurphy's refusal to neglect the men and focus on his own needs right to the terminate, including putting off his escape until later on Baton's date with Candy the night of the party on the ward.
When Bromden is hiding in the latrine from the orderlies, he looks at himself in the mirror and wonders how McMurphy can be what he is given how enormous he is. And once again Bromden attributes mythic stature to an itinerant gambler, brawler, funfair huckster, and all around eight-ball. Bromden looks at his ain face and has an epiphany (153):
...That ain't me, that ain't my face up. Information technology wasn't fifty-fifty me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me then; I was just being the fashion I looked, the way people wanted. It don't seem like I ever accept been me. How tin McMurphy be what he is?
I was seeing him different than when he first came in; I was seeing more than to him than merely big hands and ruby sideburns and a broken-nosed smiling. I'd meet him do things that didn't fit with his face or hands...
Bromden is peeling away the mask that is his face up, the persona forced on him by the Combine. This epiphany includes McMurphy, of course, as Bromden adjusts the prototype of McMurphy accordingly. Bromden portrays McMurphy as also trapped in his ain persona, pointing out that he has more and different capabilities than are expected of him, just every bit Bromden is more than a deaf-mute with a broom and a mop. Bromden has overlaid his own newly-recognized self with this progressively-sketched film of McMurphy, identifying with him and unifying their personas. And as he becomes capable of encountering the real globe directly, Bromden sees everything afresh (154):
I was seeing lots of things different... For the starting time time in years I was seeing people with none of that black outline they used to have, and ane night I was even able to see out the windows.
Along with sight, all of Bromden's senses return to him crisp and sharp: hearing, taste, feeling, and scent come flooding back, immersing him in sensations he has not experienced in years. Having recovered his senses, Bromden can perceive the ward, the infirmary, and the country exterior with renewed vigor and clarity. Equally he now functions fully physically, he tin can brainstorm the process of regaining control of his heed, hoping to ultimately achieve a signal where he no longer needs the imaginary McMurphy to hide backside.
When in the pool, Bromden is standing near McMurphy listening to his conversation with the lifeguard, and Bromden comments (160):
McMurphy must of been continuing in a pigsty because he was having to tread h2o where I was simply standing on the bottom.
Bromden must be aware of the departure betwixt McMurphy's pinnacle and his ain. And how could he be standing in a hole in an indoor swimming pool? Bromden has united himself with McMurphy, and is non seeing a clear deviation betwixt them, which is the instance with McMurphy as a product of Bromden's mind.
Subsequently McMurphy finds out that Nurse Ratched has the most input over his release date, he becomes a model patient, scrubbing the latrine and sitting back in group meetings and non disrupting the proceedings. During this time Bromden suffers a relapse; while in the library he says (171):
I want to look at ane of the books, but I'grand scared to. I'm scared to practise anything. I experience similar I'grand floating in the dusty yellowish air of the library, halfway to the bottom, halfway to the summit.
At this signal McMurphy fades into the wallpaper, losing not just his status and influence but his substance, and concurrently Bromden's view of material reality once more skews. And then, after McMurphy is informed that most of the men on the ward are voluntaries, he takes a carefully planned stride and puts his own freedom at chance. McMurphy buys cigarettes knowing they volition exist kept past the nurses and, fully aware of what is at pale, he smashes through the glass of the nurses' station to grab them. Deliberately provoking Nurse Ratched, now that he knows how much ability she has, is irrational and exhibits McMurphy as the manifestation of Bromden'south internal need for a catalyst to act in his stead.
Before the incident, Bromden senses something is about to happen. He has the same ringing in his head he had before a football game game in high school, and it signals a significant event is approaching. How can he sense or anticipate that McMurphy will make a momentous move, especially 1 that is against McMurphy's ain interests and completely out of character unless Bromden is constructing him as he goes? Once McMurphy over again confronts Nurse Ratched, the ringing in Bromden's caput stops, indicating the McMurphy invention has regained its purpose and restarting Bromden's passage toward completion.
After the fishing trip when Nurse Ratched points out to the men on the ward how much coin McMurphy has caused through his many gambits, planting the idea that he is just a con man playing them for suckers, Bromden once again expresses his view of McMurphy as godlike (255):
I still had my own notions—how McMurphy was a giant come out of the sky to save us from the Combine... how he was too big to exist bothered with something every bit measly every bit money...
And though Bromden's confidence in his creation temporarily falters, he is ultimately brought dorsum to full affidavit as McMurphy reminds him he has done everything he said he would including brand Bromden "man-sized again" (257). Just more than informative is that when the men point out McMurphy is "ever... winning things" (257), McMurphy protests by saying (258):
"Winning, for Christsakes," he said with his eyes closed. "Hoo male child, winning."
McMurphy is conspicuously non winning only expending his essence on behalf of the men, equally would whatever chimera invoked to help emotionally destitute people in need of empowerment. And this brings Bromden to a turning bespeak (258):
...without thinking near being cagey or safe or what would happen to me—and not worrying most anything else for once but the thing that needed to be done and the doing of it.
Bromden moves into action as McMurphy takes on the orderlies, and for him there is no turning dorsum. Bromden is becoming whole, and his vitality carries him through the resulting consequences—a trip with McMurphy to the Disturbed ward and electric shock therapy.
Equally the two men line upward for the shock therapy, McMurphy takes the lead and attempts to protect Bromden, telling him (270):
"Take 'er easy. I'll go kickoff. My skull's besides thick for them to hurt me. And if they tin can't injure me they tin't hurt you lot."
Apart from the stunning revelation that if McMurphy cannot be hurt, Bromden cannot be hurt (the 2 apparently one), it is Bromden who should exist reassuring McMurphy, since he has received 2-hundred shock treatments and McMurphy none. Just the character of McMurphy, created to protect Bromden until he can take care of himself, comforts Bromden giving him the power to handle the shock as never before.
Just before Bromden comes to, while he is all the same under the effect of the electricity, his mind wanders dorsum to his childhood and a game he played, Tingle Tingle Tangle Toes, while his beloved Grandmother chanted a nursery rhyme that includes the title of the book (272):
...one flew e, one flew due west, ane flew over the cuckoo's nest... O-U-T spells out... goose swoops downwardly and plucks you out.
A poesy too refers to Mrs. Tingle Tangle Toes "catching hens," and Bromden reveals (273):
I like the game and I like Grandma. I don't similar Mrs. Tingle Tangle Toes, communicable hens. I don't similar her. I do like that goose flying over the cuckoo'due south nest. I like him...
The children's game and nursery rhyme are unmistakable references to Nurse Ratched (Mrs. Tingle Tangle Toes, communicable hens—the feeble, helpless men on the ward—rabbits equally Harding calls them) and McMurphy, the Bull Goose Loony who flies over the ward and plucks Bromden out—off the ward and out of the hospital. This last longing look at his childhood occurs merely before Bromden comes out of the daze treatment, and it points to the illusory nature of the tale of McMurphy and its conclusion when Bromden escapes.
McMurphy himself foretells the end of the fantasy by giving Bromden a message deadened past the rubber hose in his mouth just before his shock begins. When Bromden comes back to consciousness afterwards his treatment, he realizes what McMurphy said—"Guts ball" (275). Guts ball is the indicator the con/fantasy has begun (78), and it now signifies its end as Bromden is complete (275):
It's fogging a trivial, simply I won't slip off and hide in it. No... never once again...
I saw an aide coming up the hall with a tray for me and knew this time I had them beat.
With his senses now intact and his heed clear, he sees more than his firsthand surround; he reenters the real globe, having been restored to life after ten years of running and hiding from the Combine (276):
If you don't accept a reason to wake up you tin can loaf around in that gray zone for a long, fuzzy time, or if you desire to bad enough I establish y'all can come up fighting right out of it. This time I came fighting out of it in less than a day, less time than ever. And when the fog was finally swept from my caput information technology seemed like I'd but come upwards after a long, deep dive, breaking the surface after being under water a hundred years. It was the last treatment they gave me.
The upshot of this transition is McMurphy is no longer required. Bromden has reached a point where he can face the Combine directly without McMurphy to run interference for him.
During the party on the ward, the McMurphy fiction reaches its climax and begins to wane. Harding remains conspicuously on the edge of the action, explaining (285):
"These things don't happen," Harding said to the girl solemnly. "These things are fantasies you lie awake at night dreaming up and then are agape to tell your analyst. You're not really hither. That wine isn't real; none of this exists. Now, permit's continue from at that place."
"These things are Thorne Smithian daydreams!" Harding said.
James Thorne Smith, a fantasy author from the 1920s and 1930s, who experienced a posthumous resurgence of popularity in the 1950s, is called on to frame what's happening on the ward. Why? What is happening on the ward, specifically during the party, that requires the perspective of a fantasy writer to elucidate and understand it? Parallels to various Thorne Smith works can be drawn (i.e., The Nightlife of the Gods), but the virtually compelling is McMurphy as Lazy Bear in Thorne Smith's children's volume Lazy Bear Lane. As Lazy Bear takes the anile and impoverished Peter and Mary back to their childhood and into a state of bounty, McMurphy transforms the lives of the men on the ward from desolate emotional poverty to fullness and plenty—and of course Lazy Comport is a creature written for children who believe in magic. Harding reveals the essence of McMurphy through the lens of brand-believe: rejuvenation requires a artless belief in the magic brought by McMurphy, a fanciful character authored by Bromden.
Bromden's incredulity during the party foreshadows the cease of the fable (292):
I had to keep reminding myself that it had truly happened, that we had made it happen.
The men on the ward fabricated it happen, with the help of McMurphy, but not solely by his efforts or insistence, every bit McMurphy is fading in significance. And the seriousness of what has happened with the party hits only Harding and Bromden; McMurphy does not run across the coming repercussions as he is being disconnected from his surroundings. Though inebriated, Harding devises a plan to save the men on the ward, and the plan calls for McMurphy to be blamed and escape. Similar the Old Testament scapegoat, McMurphy will have on himself the sins of the men and be driven out of their midst; and like the scapegoat, who would exist cast into the wilderness, McMurphy will become a fugitive running from the law.
Here a meaningful shift takes place: Bromden comes to place with Harding, the voice of reason, and Bromden has no qualms about expelling McMurphy to fend for himself, every bit he no longer needs McMurphy. Bromden has become large once again and feels in control of his senses and reason (flawed though it nevertheless is), McMurphy having concluded his part in returning Bromden to fullness. And each man on the ward has an alibi not to accompany McMurphy in his escape; he is at present alone, separate from the others, receding into nothingness.
The spirit of the McMurphy fiction is and then summed up simply earlier the men fall asleep without the plan beingness put into action. McMurphy asks why he is not similar the other men on the ward, even though he besides is dissimilar (294):
"I'thou different," McMurphy said. "Why didn't something like that happen to me? I've had people bugging me about one thing or another every bit far dorsum equally I can call up but that'due south non what—but it didn't drive me crazy."
Harding explains, clarifying why McMurphy is necessary (295):
"Information technology is us." He swept his mitt nearly him in a soft white circle and repeated, "The states."
You are here, Randle Patrick McMurphy, you exist because of "us," to assistance, protect, and empower "us." McMurphy has done all these things, and having completed his mission he fades away.
In the end though only Bromden who created it can put to death the McMurphy illusion; and with the shadow of his material self falling across McMurphy, blotting out his paradigm and "leaving simply a black space" (308) where the McMurphy phantasm had been, Bromden concludes the dream by appearing to commit a mercy killing. Instead it is the concluding act of self-love and self-fulfillment every bit Bromden is at present consummate and McMurphy vanishes.
Now Bromden demonstrates who he has been throughout the story: he, not McMurphy, is the smart gambler who looks the game over awhile before drawing himself a hand. Afterwards looking the game over for ten years, Bromden draws his manus and escapes. He now knows how to play the paw as well: he knows no 1 volition exist looking to recapture him; he knows how the Combine operates; he knows the strategies of the Combine's pes soldiers; he knows where he belongs in the world; and he is big enough to handle it all.
After his escape, in the most enlightening moment of the entire story, Bromden catches a ride with a truck driver and displays his true self. He slips hands and effortlessly into a yarn about beingness a Native American wrestler who crossed the Mob and ended up in a mental hospital. He is so natural and convincing, the driver loans him ten dollars on his promise to mail the money back to him. A few weeks on the ward with a real alive McMurphy would non give Bromden this ability. Slick and polished, smooth and skillful, he is a genuine storyteller with the instincts and self-assurance of a hustler.
More revealing than his abilities as a fabulist, though, is where he intends to go, which shows that his vision of the world has not changed (311):
I've fifty-fifty heard that some of the tribe take took to building their quondam ramshackle wood scaffolding all over that big million-dollar hydroelectric dam, and are spearing salmon in the spillway. I'd give something to see that.
Simply the visual of a brand-new, expensive hydroelectric dam with a handful of Native Americans spearing salmon from "ramshackle forest scaffolding" illegally erected on the dam indicates Bromden's mental state—he is non connecting with reality. The notion that men from his tribe are spearing salmon on the dam is Bromden asserting his perceived victory over the Combine on two levels: electricity gives the Combine its energy with the dam defacing the natural world to provide it; and electricity was used to subdue Bromden and the men on the ward every bit electric daze therapy—as the source of electricity the dam is the embodiment of the power of modernistic society, existence used to defile both nature and the individual. Bromden'due south avowal in disobedience of the dam is a delusion, displaying that in his mind he is withal in a unlike identify, another world—the world McMurphy came from—a earth where individuals have value and power, where people wander free and decide their own destinies, where men drink, fight and fornicate likewise much, a world that is big—a world of myth.
Equally the story concludes, the tale of McMurphy makes Bromden large again not to perpetuate his flawed, delusional perception of the world or to cure his clinically-diagnosed madness, simply to restore his soul. Like a true fairy tale, McMurphy serves to provide a sanctuary from the existent globe, a respite from the biting realism that Bromden'south civilisation is long gone and in doing so allows Bromden to accept these developments and reconstruct his place in society. The antidote for the destruction of the soul is the liberation of the soul as the story of McMurphy so powerfully and poignantly attests.
The significance of this culling interpretation then is that McMurphy is not another person bringing the example of how to live to the men on the ward, living, fighting and fornicating vicariously for them; he is a part of each ane of them, and his power is in that location to exist accessed and used by each private. It is Bromden, the narrator, interpreter and creator of McMurphy, who carves out the path by manifesting this part of himself and modeling the transformation that will renew and regenerate the men as they actualize the McMurphy fiction, each man on his own plotting his own class. Main Bromden plays the winning manus by refusing to brand peace with modern society and submit to a deadening, grinding decease at the easily of the Combine and its machinery. And even though he cannot destroy the Combine the way information technology destroyed his father, Cheswick, Blastic, Billy, and all the others, his resistance affords a different kind of victory: he is gratis to roam the outskirts of guild and explore its periphery, engaging the Combine on his own terms, expressing the McMurphy that was always a role of him, a natural homo exulting in a life of his own choosing—the ultimate fat pot.
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