One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

We are given this brainteaser from Chief Bromden in Part I. The reader has already gotten a glimpse of Bromden’s paranoia, from the novel’s opening lines, as well as a sense that he is not seeing things from an everyday perspective. For example, Bromden describes Nurse Ratched transforming into a huge machine, and he has to be sedated when the aides try to shave him and he starts screaming “Air Raid.” Up until this point he has not addressed the reader directly; it is as though we are overhearing his private thoughts. But in this passage he asserts himself as not only the narrator but the author of the story. We learn here that he has an important story to tell, even though it is going to be difficult. The ugly and violent images that he has already shown us, he warns us, are just a taste of what is to come.

The last line of the quote is Bromden’s request that the reader keep an open mind. His hallucinations provide metaphorical insight into the hidden realities of the hospital and should not be overlooked simply because they did not actually happen. Although over the course of the novel Bromden regains his sanity, he still witnesses many of the events while in a semi-catatonic, hallucinatory state; we have to trust in the truth of his sharp perceptions, no matter what form they take.

McMurphy gives this explanation to Harding and the other patients in Part I after his first Group Meeting. The entire group had been tearing into Harding, adhering to Doctor Spivey’s theory of the “Therapeutic Community,” where the patients are encouraged to bring “old sins out into the open.” Afterward, McMurphy tells the other patients that they were like “a bunch of chickens at a peckin’ party,” attacking the weakest one with such blind fury that they all put themselves in danger.

McMurphy is immediately shocked by the behavior of the patients and staff. It is clear to him that Ratched maintains her power through such strategies as divide and conquer. He points out that she “pecks the first peck,” or points out the first weakness, and then just sits back and watches as the patients start to attack each other. He does not understand why the patients fall for this strategy, especially since they might be next in line as the object of ridicule. The patients do seem to have blinders on; they are so blinded by their own shame that they are unable to see Ratched’s true nature and the way she manipulates and controls them so effortlessly.

This passage occurs later in the same discussion that followed McMurphy’s first Group Meeting in Part I. Here, Kesey begins to develop his misogynistic theory about modern society. Harding is talking to McMurphy, explaining that men’s one weapon against women is the penis, and that if men are unable to use rape effectively, they have no chance to regain power in society. Kesey believes that women have learned this, and they now know how to render men’s one weapon useless—in other words, they are all ball-cutters. Where rape is the male means to power, castration is the female way to domination.

These crude ideas are given substance throughout the novel. Kesey uses McMurphy’s fearless sexuality as a sign that he is sane. McMurphy goads Ratched sexually by wearing just a towel, pinching her rear, remarking on her breasts, and eventually tearing her shirt open. Most of the male patients have stories about damaging relationships with women, such as Bromden’s mother, Billy Bibbit’s mother and onetime girlfriend, and Harding’s wife. When McMurphy notices Bromden’s erection, a sign that he is “getting bigger already,” it signifies that Bromden is becoming more powerful and saner. Similarly, through sex with Candy, Billy briefly regains his confidence and his manhood, until Ratched takes it away and he commits suicide. Moreover, Ratched and the hospital supervisor, also a woman, wield all the power in the hospital: “We are victims of a matriarchy here,” says Harding.

In this passage from the beginning of Part III, Bromden, who has been gaining self-awareness since McMurphy’s arrival on the ward, remembers a scarring experience he had as a ten-year-old. Three government officials came to speak to his father, Chief Tee Ah Millatoona, about buying the tribe’s land to build a hydroelectric dam. When Bromden tried to speak to them, he noticed that “[n]ot a one of the three acts like they heard a thing [he] said.” He begins to see the world differently, believing that he can see the seams on people, as though they were inhuman or machine-like.

For Kesey, the drones who do the dirty work of an oppressive society are basically machines. The government officials who visited Bromden’s father were planning to make a profit by destroying nature, represented by the tribe’s ancient connection to the land, the river, and the fish, and replacing it with destructive technology. The brightness of the sun sheds light on the dark fact these officials taught Bromden: that people who do not have “any place ready-made where they’ll fit” are ignored and disposed of. At first the “machinery” disposes of Bromden’s words; then, over time, it seems to ignore his entire being.

While on the fishing expedition, the patients are able to laugh freely and feel like whole humans again. As usual, this happens with McMurphy’s guidance—he is an example for all the patients to follow. Here, Bromden shows how McMurphy’s booming laughter in the face of chaos, which could be seen as the mark of a psychopath, is the one thing that keeps McMurphy sane.

Bromden implies that it is the pressures of society—the captain, the five thousand houses, the Big Nurse, “the things that hurt you”—that drive people insane. To maintain sanity in such an oppressive and cruel world, people cannot allow these external forces to exert too much power. When a person succumbs to seeing and experiencing all the sadness and suffering of humanity, as Bromden has done for ten years, it naturally makes him or her unable, or unwilling, to cope with reality—in other words, it can make that person “plumb crazy.”