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"Do I look like a sane man?" That's the question Randall Patrick Mc Murphy asks during his first Group Meeting, and there's no question that for most readers the answer will be a quick and resounding "Yes. " Mc Murphy's sanity takes the ward by storm: none of the patients have met anyone like him, except perhaps the Chief, who sees in this red-headed Irishman a hint of his Indian father's humor and bravery. Where the other patients are timid and quiet, Mc Murphy is cocky and loud; where they are unable to do more than snicker, his healthy laughter shakes the walls; where they are sexually repressed, he is a self-proclaimed (and, by the evidence, genuine) champion lover. Years of hard living are etched in his face; to the hallucination-prone Chief, even his hands can transmit power to make the Chief's own hands larger. The title Mc Murphy claims, Bull Goose Looney, with its connotations of strength and freedom, seems perfectly suited for him. Much of Cuckoo's Nest is devoted to showing how Mc Murphy teaches the rest of the patients to be sane. What does this sanity consist of?
Above all, it is the ability to laugh, both at yourself and at a world that is often ludicrous and cruel. Says Chef Bromden, "He knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. " He may brag, but he never takes himself too seriously. When George Sorenson refuses to shake his "dirty" hand, Mc Murphy doesn't take offense, merely jokes, "Hand, how do you suppose that old fellow knew all the evil you been into?" And he accepts himself. Where Harding is embarrassed by his "feminine" hands, Mc Murphy is at ease with his gentler side- his fine handwriting, for example. Another mark of the sane man is sexual health, for both Mc Murphy and Key see power in sexual terms. One of the ways the Nurse and other members of the Combine destroy men is by making them impotent; the Chief's return to sanity is signalled in part by an erection; Billy will defeat his domineering mother (and Nurse Ratched) when he loses his virginity to Candy.
Equally important is a disregard of society's rules and conventions- it's no coincidence that the same girl who first taught Mc Murphy about sex also taught him that rules (in this case the rule that every sexual encounter must be followed or preceded by marriage) need not be obeyed. Whether he is brushing his teeth with soap powder, letting Martini play his own wild style of Monopoly, or watching a non-existent baseball game on a blank television screen, Mc Murphy never lets rules- or even common sense- stand in the way of good fun. Cuckoo's Nest is set in Oregon, and it is very much a novel of the American West: the dream of the free and open frontier is contrasted with the drab and regimented world of the hospital. And just as Chief Bromden recalls the Indian past, Mc Murphy is in many ways a modernized version of a hero of the old West. He's described repeatedly as a movie cowboy, striding towards a showdown, and at the end of the novel, as the Lone Ranger leaving the town he has saved from the bad guys. He may lack a college education, but he has native intelligence: he knows a pecking party when he sees one.
This, then, is the Mc Murphy who enters the ward at the start of the book. But he is not a static character; he changes considerably during his time at the hospital. The court that sent him to the hospital ruled him a psychopath; while his diagnosis is so obviously harsh even Dr. Spivey doubts it, we may suspect that it contains just a bit of truth.
Among the characteristics of a psychopathic personality are extreme self-centered ness and a disregard for moral and social responsibilities. Certainly Mc Murphy shows some of those characteristics in the early portion of the book. He came to the hospital only to seek an easier life than he had at the work farm, and at first the battles he fights are fought solely in pursuit of that easy life. They may benefit the other patients, but first they benefit him: it's Mc Murphy who wants to play cards in the tub room, who wants to watch the World Series. Even the Chief suspects that Mc Murphy has escaped the Combine because he has "no one to care about, which is what made him free enough to be a good con man. " The same strong instinct for self-preservation that makes him break the rules also makes him obey when he discovers Nurse Ratched's power to keep him in the hospital. But then something happens.
One of the patients, Cheswick, who has idolized Mc Murphy, grows despondent when Mc Murphy surrenders. He kills himself. Mc Murphy begins to see that, against his will, he has been saddled with the responsibility of being a hero to men who desperately need a hero. The rest of the book shows him slowly but steadily rising to that responsibility, teaching the other patients- through basketball games and fishing trips- not to let their fears paralyze them. Unfortunately, his generosity is still mixed with a desire for personal gain: he lets George Sorenson go on the fishing trip for $ 5, not for free; he makes the Chief keep his bargain to lift the control panel so Mc Murphy can win bets; he demands money from Billy for Candy's visit. This residue of greed convinces the patients that Mc Murphy was never anything more than a conman.
Only the Chief understands the truth: that at great cost to himself, Mc Murphy has become the hero the patients require. Their need for him is what keeps his worn out body and spirit going; it's what pushes him to fight for George in the shower, suffer shock treatments, refuse escape until Billy has his date with Candy, and, finally, suicidally, attack Nurse Ratched. Throughout the book, but particularly in the scene where the Chief and Mc Murphy undergo shock treatment, parallels are drawn between Mc Murphy and Christ. While for some it may verge on blasphemy to call this gambler and sinner Christlike, it is true that Mc Murphy has sacrificed himself for others. In the end the Combine scores what seems to be a complete victory over him; a lobotomy has destroyed him even before the Chief puts an end to his life. Only through the Chief and the other patients who, thanks to Mc Murphy's courageous example, leave the hospital to fight the Combine elsewhere, does Mc Murphy live on.
A ratchet: a piece of machinery. That's one of the most important clues to the character of the Nurse who bears a similar name. Nurse Ratched (the name also carries unpleasant echoes of rat and wretched) has transformed herself from a human being into a machine that demands complete control and perfect order from everyone. For the book's other major characters, Mc Murphy and Chief Bromden, we " re given detailed accounts of their life before they entered the hospital. For Nurse Ratched we " re given only the barest outlines: that she is about 50, unmarried, a former Army nurse. Why so little?
Because the hospital is her life: she has shaped it in her image, it has shaped her in its image. So powerful are the Chief's descriptions of the Nurse as a mechanism of terror, able to swell to tractor size and control the hospital with beams of hate, that it's easy to see the Nurse as the embodiment of pure evil. And because the world of the Cuckoo's Nest is in many ways a cartoon world, with good and evil clearly defined, that view is in large part correct. Still, Cuckoo's Nest would not be so effective a criticism of the modern world if its characters didn't bear some resemblances to the people we see around us every day. The Nurse is not insane: she could not have risen to her position of power if she were. Nor is she unique in her drive for complete control-she represents forces that influence all of us.
If we were to visit the ward on one of the public relations man's tours, we would probably see the Nurse simply as the strict middle-aged lady Harding describes, the lady the PR man calls Mother Ratched. She smiles, speaks softly to her aides, bids good morning to her patients. She appears to have the best interests of her ward at heart. She is the voice of common sense: after all, her patients are mentally disturbed; they need some control in their lives. The Nurse's menace comes from the fact that she has convinced herself that if some control is good, complete control is better. In fact, it's essential, and any threats to it must be destroyed.
By putting her goal of complete power ahead of everything else, she perverts the good intentions of the hospital, hiring aides who abuse the patients, and doctors too timid to cure anyone, setting patients spying on one another and turning a useful therapeutic technique, the Group Meeting, into an orgy of shameful psychological back-biting. She destroys the patients' confidence in themselves so they will never be strong enough to leave her. There's no question that the repression of sexuality is an important part of the Nurse's tactics. She has denied her own sexuality by hiding her large breasts beneath a stiff white uniform and Mc Murphy points out that no one could become sexually aroused by her.
If, as Harding says, the patients are victims of a matriarchy, Nurse Ratched is certainly the head matriarch. But even Mc Murphy comes to see that the Nurse's sexual repression is only part of a larger problem- desire for complete control over nature and man that the Nurse shares with much of the modern world. Our guide to the world of the Cuckoo's Nest is the towering Chief Bromden, son of a Columbia Indian Chief, Tee Ah Millatoona (The-Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain), and a white woman, Mary Louise Bromden. In many ways One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is as much the Chief's story as it is Mc Murphy's, and he is as much its hero. For all of the battles Mc Murphy fights in the ward are fought by the Chief as well; of all the patients, the Chief shows the greatest courage in fighting against the longest odds, and it is only because of his final victory that we are able to hear the story of Cuckoo's Nest at all. The Chief may seem at first an impossible narrator...
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