NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
... to know. A man who has for years pretended to be a deaf-mute, his mind is a jumble of seemingly random, terrifying sights and sounds: people swell and shrink according to their power over others; like machines, they shoot electric beams at those who stand in their way. In moments of greatest stress, the Chief's mind becomes entirely clouded by a dense fog. Only when he recalls his Indian boyhood are his thoughts at all clear, and even these happy memories tend to be shattered by his fear of the present.
Yet as we come to make sense of the Chief's visions and nightmare, we see they paint a weirdly accurate picture of the hospital and of the illness that sent him there. He has been damaged by an organization he calls the Combine; in fact, the Combine is just his unstable view of forces that affect every one of us. In the modern world, machines destroy nature, efficiency comes before beauty, and robot-like cooperation is more valued than individual freedom. As an Indian, the Chief was particularly vulnerable. His white mother forced her husband and son to take her name; she helped arrange the sale of the Indian village for a government hydroelectric dam. After these childhood defeats, come many others.
Though intelligent and schooled, he can only find menial jobs. His experiences in World War II are so frightening they form the basis for his hallucinations of the fog machine that operates on the ward. He sees his father "shrink"- in his mind, the diminishing is a literal, physical one- from a proud Indian Chief to a man stripped of his name, able to live only off charity from the government that ruined his life. By the time we meet him, the Chief, too, is "small, " though his height remains six- feet seven inches. To the aides he is a baby, a household object, as evidenced by their nickname for him, Chief Broom. Mc Murphy arrives at a crucial point in the Chief's life.
The Chief has endured years in the hospital, years of self-imposed silence, years of abuse. He's undergone over 200 shock treatments. Clearly, he is a strong man. But now, we see, his strength is near its end. He tells us, "One of these days I'll quit straining and let myself go completely, lose myself in the fog. " Mc Murphy's arrival at first seems able only to postpone that day slightly. The Chief is entertained and impressed by the new patient, who reminds him of his father, but he's also frightened of him.
The freedom that Mc Murphy offers is as much a threat as it is a blessing- and the Chief reacts to it as he does to all threats, by cowering in the fog. In fact, by the time Mc Murphy is battling for his right to watch the World Series, the stress within the Chief is so great it seems he will at last lose himself in the fog completely. It's easier to be lost than to be sensitive to all the pain and injury the Combine has caused, pain and injury that neither he nor anyone else can heal. But the Chief does not lose himself. Instead, he raises his hand to vote with Mc Murphy. This is a tribute to Mc Murphy's strength of character, but it is also a tribute to the Chief's.
For as the Chief's hand rises, he at first claims Mc Murphy is pulling it with invisible strings, just as Nurse Ratched might have. Then he corrects himself: "No. That's not the truth. I lifted it myself. " The fact is that the Chief possesses his own reserves of courage- it just took Mc Murphy to remind him that they were there. Once this breakthrough is made, the Chief slowly but steadily heals.
The fog and the hallucinations come less often, and he is able to remember more of his past and to think about it rationally. With Mc Murphy he gives up the pretense of being deaf and dumb, allowing himself to share his pain with someone. He recognizes that despite life's anguish, he has to laugh- a sure sign of sanity. Gradually, too, the man who said he could help no one realizes he must help his rescuer. As the Chief is regaining his power to fight back against the Combine, Mc Murphy is losing his. When, in the shower, Mc Murphy fights to protect George Sorenson, the Chief joins in, even though he knows it will lead him to another appointment on the electroshock therapy table.
The Chief is able to survive even this: there will be no more fog. At the end of the book, the roles of Mc Murphy and the Chief are reversed. Mc Murphy is weary and near defeat; the Chief has gained strength. Just as the Chief can lift the control panel Mc Murphy couldn't, he will make the escape Mc Murphy cannot. After the Chief has smothered his friend out of love for him, he tries on his cap- and finds it's too small. The Chief has regained his true size, and he will be able to fight the Combine on another battlefield.
The best educated of the men on the ward, Dale Harding is president of the Patients' Council when Mc Murphy is admitted to the hospital. He serves a useful purpose, both for Mc Murphy and for us: while the Chief with his hallucinations may give us an unusual insight into the hospital, Harding gives us the sorts of rational explanations we " re used to hearing. It's Harding who tells Mc Murphy how Nurse Ratched is able to maintain her power, how electroshock therapy works, what a lobotomy does to people. It's Harding who gives the new patients and the reader the understanding of the matriarchy Nurse Ratched directs.
Clever and well-read, Harding can talk smoothly about psychiatric theory and make joking allusions to the works of William Faulkner. Yet he is proof that intelligence alone is not a sufficient defense against oppression. Harding lacks courage, and lacking courage he can only use his intelligence to deny unpleasant truths, to flee from battles. When Mc Murphy points out the viciousness of the Nurse and her Group Meetings, Harding defends them eloquently, snidely condemning Mc Murphy for his lack of education, even though he knows (and later admits) Mc Murphy is completely correct. Harding seems to stand on the sidelines watching each act of rebellion Mc Murphy undertakes, hopeful that the new patient will fail.
Perhaps his feeble status is indicated most vividly in his laugh- or rather, in his inability to laugh: the sound he makes is painful, "like a nail being crossbar red out of a plank of green pine. " As with so many of the patients, Harding's problem is in large part sexual: ashamed of his effeminacy (symbolized by his graceful, uncontrollable hands), he is terrified of his wife and her accusations of homosexuality and weakness. Harding's transformation over the course of the book is almost as striking as the Chief's. Thanks to Mc Murphy, he comes to realize that effeminacy is not his real problem: the real problem is his fear of it. Following Mc Murphy's example he is able to overcome his fear, to add courage to his intelligence. The healed Harding is in his way nearly as strong a man as the Chief. He sees the necessity of Mc Murphy's escape and makes plans for it, and when, unhappily, the escape fails and Mc Murphy is lobotomized, Harding is able to take on Mc Murphy's role as card sharp, jokester, and constant irritant to Nurse Ratched.
He comes to deserve the title that he couldn't win at the book's start, but which Mc Murphy bestows on him at the end: Bull Goose Looney. And he is able to leave the hospital in the dignified way he wanted to leave it, met by his wife, ready to start a new life on the outside. Perhaps the saddest of all Nurse Ratched's victim in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is Billy Bibbit, for he comes so close to not being her victim at all. Sensitive, intelligent, he begins the novel seeming to everyone a mere boy, though in fact he's more than 30 years old.
The most obvious symptom of the illness that has placed Billy in the hospital is his stutter, which, like the Chief's fog and Harding's fluttering hands, grows worse when he is under stress. The stutter forced him out of college and lost him the girl he wanted to marry; interestingly, Billy shares this speech defect, along with an innocence of spirit and a final doom, with another famous Billy of American literature, the title character of Melville's Billy Budd- the second obvious reference to Melville in the novel. (The first of course is Mc Murphy's whale-decorated shorts. ) The stutter, however, is a symptom of a more serious disease: Billy's inability to grow from a boy into a man. Manhood is defined in this book largely in sexual terms, and the fact that Billy has not lost his virginity though he is past 30 shows that he hasn't taken command of his life in other ways as well. As he admits, he lacks guts.
The reason? He has been dominated by a mother who will not let him grow up (perhaps, it is hinted, because his growing up would be a sign of her own growing old). Definitely a member of Harding's matriarchy, Mrs. Bibbit has pushed Billy into the hospital; her good friend Nurse Ratched does her best to keep him there.
Just as Billy's plight is defined sexually, so is his recovery. At first he is embarrassed by Mc Murphy's lewd jokes; soon he is flirting with the nurses and making jokes himself. When Mc Murphy's prostitute friend, Candy Starr, visits the ward, Billy alone knows how to make her feel at ease with the sort of attention she's used to: a wolf whistle. And on the fishing trip it's obvious Billy is more interested in Candy than he is in salmon.
The attempt to achieve a final cure for Billy brings us to the climax of the novel, as Mc Murphy arranges for him to lose his virginity to Candy. This arrangement ends disastrously. After enjoying a successful night together, Billy and the prostitute are discovered. For a few minutes, Mc Murphy's cure seems to have worked. Billy grins fearlessly at Nurse Ratched and wishes her a good morning without stuttering.
But in seconds her anger reduces him to a weak "gutless" child again, tongue-tied, begging for her mercy, blaming the situation on everyone but himself. He can't stand this retreat back to the boy he was before; he commits suicide, as he had twice before threatened to do. His death sends Mc Murphy into his final, fatal battle with the Nurse. Bibliography:
Free research essays on topics related to: nurse ratched, electroshock therapy, murphy, mc murphy, real problem
Research essay sample on Mc Murphy Nurse Ratched
