First edition cover Feb, 1962
Later he worked in a hospital’s psychiatric ward at the nearby Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. During the night shift there he used to converse with the patients. He observed that many of them were thinking people who acted abnormally according to societal standards, but who were otherwise fine. It was the push to conform that had ejected them from the free society in which they lived.
The book depicts therapies for the insane ranging from group discussions under an iron-willed nurse, to the invasive Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) and surgical Lobotomy. The inventor of Lobotomy, Egas Moniz, won the Nobel Prize in 1949; but its use has been entirely discontinued after the 1950s because the results were poor. Besides, newer psychiatric drugs were coming on stream with hopes for better results.
Ken Kesey – the Oregon Author who lived a colourful life
ECT has remained on the treatment list as a last option for maladies like depression and bipolar disorder, but with two radical changes:
1) it is performed only under anaesthesia, and
2) it is done with far lower currents and voltages than originally used and employs an ultra brief pulse of less than 0.5 millisec
McMurphy – locked up and alienated, he nevertheless tried to resurrect the spirits of the inmates
The novel can be read as McMurphy’s attempt to liberate the patients of the asylum from the tyranny of Nurse Ratched and the system she represented, so that they could live with dignity even within the precincts of the loony bin.
As before the readers gathered online using Zoom (courtesy of Rachel Cleetus) and were immensely comforted to listen and talk with each other in these trying times of Covid-19. Here is a group picture – only Kavita is missing:
Full Account and Record of the Session on July 25, 2020
Ken Kesey – Author, Journalist (1935–2001)
Quotes
What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it.
He knows that 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.
No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?
This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.
... you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep in balance.
Biography
Geeta read the life of Ken Kesey as set out in a Resource Guide to the play by Dale Wasserman based Kesey’s novel, when it was staged at Portland Center Stage in Portland, OR, during the 2010-11 season.
Ken Kesey was born in Colorado in 1935 and raised on a dairy farm by his parents in Springfield, Oregon. In high school he was on the wrestling and American football team . His access to the University of Oregon was facilitated by a wrestling scholarship. He had an interest in acting, and later got a scholarship for graduate study in writing at Stanford University. There he came under the influence of Wallace Stegner, dean of American writers of the West who ran the program, now named after him. Kesey and a distinguished coterie got a great mentorship, but he later fell out with Stegner, because as he said, “I took LSD and he stayed with Jack Daniel’s; the line between us was drawn.”
It was at Stanford in 1960 Kesey became a paid volunteer to test the new mind-altering drug called LSD. He faithfully reported on his experiences as required. That was the beginning and the sixties became the era of LSD (acid as it was called) and there was hardly a performer or creative type who did not resort to it – Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Timothy Leary – they all dropped acid. So did Aldous Huxley of mescaline fame, and even Steve Jobs of Silicon Valley. It was a Swiss chemist who discovered it by accident in 1943:
Psychedelic portrait of Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, who accidentally discovered LSD’s psychedelic properties in 1943 (Credit- Getty)
Kesey also worked in a psychiatric ward at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital during the night shift and entered into conversations with the patients. Working there as a psychiatric aide he wrote the opening passages of OFOTCN while high on peyote, the cactus plant from which the alkaloid mescaline is derived. Kesey's novel came out in 1962 and had clear elements of the hallucination that comes from LSD and his understanding of the plight of people who were the outcasts of society in asylums.
The book became a best seller and its film rights were purchased by Kirk Douglas, the Hollywood actor, who got it converted to a two-act play by Dale Wasserman; it had a good run in New York with Kirk Douglas as McMurphy. But the film rights were passed on to his son Michael Douglas who got Miloš Forman, the Czech director, to make the film in 1975. Jack Nicholson played Randle McMurphy. Kesey, it seems, never liked the script, because it didn't use Chief Bromden as the narrator as the novel does; Kesey never watched the film although it garnered five Oscars.
Kesey published his next novel Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964, partly under the influence of LSD. But perhaps he followed Hemingway's advice:
Write drunk, edit sober.
It is considered an even better novel and also received the accolade of being adapted as a film, starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda.
Write drunk, edit sober.
It is considered an even better novel and also received the accolade of being adapted as a film, starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda.
Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters bus - the vehicle that in 1964 took Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters across America on a famous bus journey
The Pranksters not only dropped acid but treated themselves to the music of a band called the Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead. Another writer, Tom Wolfe, celebrated their journey in the 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It was the time of the hippie counter-culture movement in America.
In 1966 Kesey was forced to flee to Mexico when he was convicted of possessing marijuana (weed as it was called). But he returned and served time on a work detail in a farm before going back to his father's dairy farm in Oregon to be with his wife and four children. In Oregon he was in his element and wrote stories, taught a graduate course at the University, and mentored students. He coached the wrestling team in school nearby.
After a gap of thirty years he published his third novel, Sailor Song, in 1992 and two years later, Last Go Round. He died in 2001 of liver cancer.
The Novel
If the novel has had a long appeal to successive generations of readers one reason is that it comes out strongly in favour of the individual, struggling against a heartless establishment that wants to stamp out what makes each of us unique, and is bent on creating a mindless class of conformist people. The asylum has a system which, under the guise of treating people to heal them, is really dedicated to expunging the last signs of their humanity.
Chief Bromden realises that the system is insidious, and he narrates: “McMurphy doesn’t know it, but he’s onto what I realized a long time back, that it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”
Randle McMurphy comes into the system and spends his first week observing and understanding the mechanisms whereby Nurse Ratched, the chief tormentor, goes about her subtle undermining of the patients’ will to resist. Her control has reduced the patients to obedient children and aggravated the problems of many of the inmates.
It is then that McMurphy pitches his cunning against that of Nurse Ratched and starts the gradual process of taking away her weapons of control and enabling the patients to have some normal human fun. He foments revolt, of course, but gradually and not overtly at first, keeping his own aggressive instincts under control.
Then in a surprising manoeuvre he puts her on the defensive by smashing the nurse station window and snatching the cigarettes she's been denying, under the pretext that they are being gambled away to McMurphy.
The highpoint of McMurphy's attempt to liberate the asylum inmates comes with the fishing expedition, planned by McMurphy. That chapter is a stroke of comic genius. After playing a con game en route at the gas station, McMurphy lays back in the boat and enjoys seeing everyone suddenly blossom into happy human beings, set free from bondage and having more fun than they've had in years of being cooped up in the hospital. They laugh, and can't stop laughing. This reminds one of a quote by Chief Bromden, the native Indian who narrates the novel, although ironically he is under the cloak of appearing deaf-mute until almost the end:
“Maybe he couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to laugh yet, but he knew you can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.”
Geeta
Mental health is a big problem but we are not aware of it, said Geeta. In America 44% of people have been to a shrink at least once in their lifetime. But one should add that among a certain class there, it is almost a sign of having arrived. In Kerala 11.4 % seek help. The percentage of all deaths worldwide, attributed to suicide is 1.4%. The same article states that “most people who have died by suicide have suffered from mental disorders.” When they seek help there are few institutions to help them; if they are given medications, they often forget to take them and then the problems get worse.
Thommo
Thommo read this book many years ago and this was a re-reading. He has seen the movie with Jack Nicholson as the protagonist. The passage from Chapter 2 is about the first impression the patients have of McMurphy when he enters the asylum.
Priya said she could well imagine McMurphy's laugh and how refreshing it would have been for all the inmates. Yes, in that whole sterile place, it would have been amazing to hear his booming laughter, said Thommo. “Nice passage!” said Priya.
Geeta
Geeta read a few lines from the Introduction to the novel by Robert Faggen (Penguin, Modern Classics Edition).
“Once when Kesey was leaving the Pendleton Roundup with his father an Indian, a knife between his teeth deliberately ran into an oncoming diesel truck bringing piping to the dam project. The suicide left its own mark on Kesey who had witnessed a man willing to make the greatest sacrifice in honour of a way of life, a way of life no developer could buy from him. In a perverse way the Indian embodied Thoreau’s view that in ‘wildness there is preservation of the world.’ The dam presents machinery that that destroys one way of life in service to another. The asylum in Kesey’s world, performs a similar task.”
The reading passage was from Chapter 3 where Chief Bromden describes what happened to a couple of inmates whose Electro Shock Therapy left them badly scarred
McMurphy undergoes Electro-Convulsive Therapy Scene
Priya
In Chapter 5 McMurphy is trying to foment revolt. The patients think they are all rabbits, and the big nurse is the wolf. McMurphy is trying to disabuse them of this crippling mental notion. This is Dale Harding, and he is the gay guy. At that time homosexuality was considered a mental disorder in America. In many parts of the world it still is. In this passage by the end we see how McMurphy rounds up the inmates to revolt against Nurse Ratched. After her reading Priya had to leave for another engagement. By general consensus Aug 20 was fixed for the next session, on Romantic Poets.
Arundhaty
In her reading some background is provided to the the culture from which Chief Bromden came and the kind of life that was led by the native Indians living along the Columbia River and how they lost everything with the coming of the dams along the river.
Native American salmon fishing by dipnetting from scaffolding at Celilo Falls, prior to its inundation by The Dalles Dam in 1957. Photo from U.S. Army Corps Digital Visual Library, website
It gives a picture Chief's life as a boy and his father who went to seed with alcoholism. It describes the shame of stuttering Billy Bibbit.
Zakia
Many of the inmates are there by choice and in Chapter 22 McMurphy can’t understand why they don’t want to leave. Harding is typical. McMurphy acts quite confident with Nurse Ratched and gets away with quite a lot by talking back to her. Interrogating Bibbit and Sefelt, McMurphy learns they could leave any time they wanted – but they don't want to. He is taken aback.
Devika
The power play between Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched in Chapter 23 was the highlight of Devika's passage. From the time he entered the hospital McMurphy has been trying to rile Big Nurse. He's also got most of the Acutes on his side. In the scene chosen, Nurse Ratched has taken away a privilege. McMurphy waits patiently till Big Nurse runs through her points at the meeting and then walks purposefully towards her in such a way that she becomes wary of his intentions. There's terror on her face. All the Acutes too are watching. McMurphy then carefully walks across to the nurses’ station, shatters the glass window, picks up his cigarette packs, and tells Nurse Ratched apologetically that the glass was so clean that he didn't realise it was there!!
McMurphy breaks the glass window of the Nurse's Station to get cigarettes
“What a passage you chose!”, exclaimed KumKum when Devika finished reading.
Gopa
This is the part in Chapter 24 where Chief Bromden surrenders his mute act with McMurphy and they talk about the chewing gum stuck on his bed’s underside. KumKum thought it was a very sweet passage in which McMurphy and the Chief get to know each other and an intimacy dawns.
McMurphy tells Chief Bromden, ‘You fooled ‘em Chief, you fooled ‘em all!’
Joe
McMurphy's mission in this hospital is to first of all shake it up; and then people will come through and revolt and become real people instead of cowering in front of Nurse Ratched. The big Nurse is the villain of the piece. McMurphy continues in this vein, and this passage is about something McMurphy has been plotting for a while – taking a group of inmates out fishing, going out with girls and having fun, being themselves and leaving behind the constricted atmosphere of the asylum. Before starting the passage Joe quoted from Chief Bromden. The Chief is the narrator of the novel – ironic, because for most of the novel he acts deaf and mute. In the passage just read by Gopa he has been liberated from that deaf-mute act he had to put on to get by without causing a ripple – and hear everything, because people would speak in his presence imagining he was deaf. He is talking about McMurphy in this quote:
“Maybe he couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to laugh yet, but he knew you can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.”
McMurphy's laughter has therapeutic effect
Part of the change McMurphy introduces in the asylum is through laughter. It’s one of the ways of building up their strength and making them ‘bigger.’ In the fishing expedition which McMurphy organises, he is extremely active on the trip up to the boat; getting free gas to be charged to the asylum, because it is a Government-sponsored trip; using the doctor’s $10 contribution to buy refreshments, and completely conning the gas station attendant, then the boat owner, and so on. But once he’s hijacked the boat from the reluctant owner, who had qualms about renting to a group of lunatics, and got the group aboard and racing off, he lies back and becomes passive, letting the others enjoy and be happy. He’s completed one phase of their redemption!
It ends on McMurphy's observation that 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!
KumKum said it was a juicy passage and Joe extracted all that he could so that the juice was oozing out.
KumKum
KumKum sought to read from Chapter 26 that she thought encapsulated the interplay between Nurse Ratched and the inmates. She loved this passage. It's the day after the fishing trip. Big Nurse wants to trigger resentment against McMurphy for the money he has been making off the rest of the inmates in his various enterprises. She fails as Harding comes to the rescue and praises McMurphy's capitalistic talent to make a little money. He's a “a good old red, white, and blue hundred-per-cent American con man,” says Harding, and that's nothing be embarrassed about! Everybody involved had had their fun.
Joe said McMurphy wasn't really cheating them. He was like a pro playing amateurs. Thommo said the guys had a lot of idle money stashed away with nothing to enjoy. This way they had fun, and Thommo said most of the time he allowed the inmates to win it back. He was a shrewd guy, said Geetha.
Geetha
Geetha's passage from Chapter 27 immediately follows KumKum's passage. The fishing expedition had some repercussions for the gang who went. They had to go to the washrooms and have enemas to be cleansed of all the germs they might have brought back from the trip. George who was made Captain of the boat was refusing to allow the asylum people to administer it to him. The ward boy Washington was using force. Finally McMurphy lost it. He came forward in defence of George. A brawl ensues and the Chief, George, and McMurphy beat up the ward boys, and a few bones were broken.
Nurse Ratched coolly gave them a chance to apologise. They refused and were sent to the ward for the Disturbed. The lap nurse in that ward is quite different, more humane, and carefully salves their bruises. The passage ends with her saying:
“Army nurses, trying to run an Army hospital ... are a little sick themselves. I sometimes think all single nurses should be fired after they reach thirty-five.”
“At least all single Army nurses,” McMurphy added.
– A very sweet encounter in this faceless asylum.
Saras
In Chapter 29 after Billy's death McMurphy attacks the Big Nurse Ratched. He rips her uniform and is finally overpowered by the white uniformed supervisors, and is taken down. Saras felt very sad. The whole essence of McMurphy is there: he is trying to help these people, and in the end he himself loses the battle. Saras did Psychology in college and there is a mental hospital in Shahdara in Delhi, a trans Yamuna settlement. Her class was taken there for a field trip. They were shown somebody getting elctro-convulsive therapy. Saras said: “It was horrific. As I read this book the scene kept coming back to my mind. It was terrible! Was it proper to let twenty of us watch something like this, even if we were Psychology students?”
Joe asked if this treatment continues. Saras replied, “This was in 1981 or 1982. The treatment is still done. They take release forms from the guardians of the patient.” Gopa said in some countries it is forbidden, but Saras said not in India.
Pamela
This is the final Chapter 29, where the Chief escapes after the mercy killing of McMurphy. The Chief decides to smother McMurphy with a pillow rather than let him live like a vegetable the rest of his life in the asylum, humiliated day in and day out.
The opening and closing shots of the film are scenes of nature –
top: McMurphy arrives from the work farm
bottom: Chief Bromden slips away into his native habitat
Pamela said, it may be sad, but also happy in a way because somebody got out of the crazy place intact, the Chief – he's the One who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And the Chief used McMurphy's idea about how to escape. There's meaning in leaving something behind to let someone else carry on and do better. “What we leave behind for our children, what we leave behind for society, our ideas should be used by someone to enjoy and be free in this world,” said Pamela.
Chief Bromden lifts the control panel off its base and hurls it against the window to make good his escape
Gopa said she wondered who was it that Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: was it Chief Bromden or McMurphy? Saras chimed in with the same question. KumKum said it was both of them. Pamela said it may appear on the face of things to be the Chief, but she thinks it was McMurphy. The mercy-killing is an important event in the novel; it was what allowed McMurphy also to escape.
KumKum observed that the selection of passages had given us a total reading of the novel in synoptic fashion. Quite accidental the way it came about. May it happen oftener in our novels in future.
Pamela's brother who saw the movie was so disturbed by it that he drove around the city of Delhi five times on his Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike before he came came home. He said, “Even I do crazy things in my life, but if ten people got together and called me mad, will I be considered mad?” The thought of involuntary incarceration in an asylum got him so disturbed he did five chukkers of Delhi.
Joe alluded to the idea of redemption that runs through the novel and the occurrence of several images of Christ, including one where McMurphy is stretched out for treatment with his arms extended like Christ on the cross, and even asks jokingly if there is a crown of thorns for him to wear. Saras nodded. In the end it is appropriate that he dies, as Christ did, but he does complete his salvific mission.
There are several messages in the novel, said Joe, but an important one is not to be alarmed when people in unison call you crazy; it is they who could be crazy.
"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you ...” (Matthew 5:11)
McMurphy gives the inmates confidence to walk forward like saved men. The one who gets out in the end is emblematic of Salvation accomplished.
McMurphy gives the inmates confidence to walk forward like saved men. The one who gets out in the end is emblematic of Salvation accomplished.
Pamela took another tack and compared the Chief to John the Baptist (though the Chief did not get beheaded!). He was a forerunner to McMurphy, and collaborator. Geetha said in the end there is a fellowship among the inmates; whereas before they were feeling alienated.
Several readers had a laugh pointing to the cap Joe was wearing. “Joe is very apt in his dressing,” said Devika.
KumKum gave notice of the next book (Catch-22) as an Everest to climb, but after that, the last novel of the year (Disgrace by Coetzee) is a very pleasant read. Devika vowed to read 15 pages a day to finish Catch-22. She said after reading two chapters she took a shine to the humour, it's really something. KumKum didn't like it because it's about war, a subject she dislikes. She told Joe it’s boring, etc. KumKum regretted she got very little of the humour despite having lived in America for so many years. According to her you have to love war and military stuff to like the book. Is that really so?
Joe
Joe referred in the end to something that is only peripherally mentioned in the book via Chief Bromden. This is the life of the native Indians who fished for salmon along the Columbia River, one of the mighty rivers that flows into the Pacific, over a thousand miles long. Bromden's vision of the Combine, as he calls it, and its machinery in the asylum, has been formed by the unsettling wounds of his past: the loss of his family's tribal fishing grounds by government construction of a hydroelectric dam along the Columbia River, one of the most heavily dammed rivers of the US.
In a panic-laden moment at the asylum the Chief recalls the US Department of Interior coming to uproot their little tribe with a gravel-crushing machine. The dam is part of the machinery that affects both men and fish; it is the immovable force that destroys their way of life. Kesey's experience with native Indians and the outrage of destructive power began much earlier than the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital where he spent time as a hospital aide.
Fish ladder for returning adult salmon and steelhead at Bonneville Dam, the lowermost of the dams on the Columbia River
Salmon are anadromous fishes which spend most of their adult lives at sea, but return to fresh water to spawn. The salmon used to migrate up the Columbia river shooting the rapids all the way to the source waters to lay their eggs and then head back to the ocean. When the waters were dammed it became impassable for the salmon; to assuage the protests of environmentalists the government tried to build sloping concrete ladders of flowing water around the dams to enable the salmon to climb up, but these ladders were not very successful.
Salmon Fishing is an incredibly important part of Native Indian life – spear fishing, dipnetting, fishing scaffolds, cable cars, and the drying process
The native Indians used to sit on scaffolding projecting out of the banks of the river to dip their nets and catch what fish they still could. It was an entire Indian culture of catching, smoking, and preserving fish that was completely dislocated by dam building. When you destroy a traditional culture you destroy the very spirit of the people. Chief Bromden and his father’s family were among the casualties.
Salmon drying by traditional methods in a smokehouse
The session ended with singing Happy Birthday to Thommo who was celebrating the following day. People exchanged notes on the Covid-19 lockdown and the containment applied to certain Wards of Cochin Corporation, not however to Thevara or Yacht Club Enclave. Fort Kochi is locked down and cordoned off. Devika talked of visiting a relative in Aluva, and right through the drive patches were closed. Aluva itself was closed, and you had to make your way via little marked roads. This too shall pass, said Devika. Restaurants like Sarovaram are open, with social distancing. You can park and take food home. KumKum is longing for Dosa, that big Paper Masala roll Sarovaram makes. Devika said, “come home any time, maybe not the big one, but I'll serve crisp smaller ones just as tasty, with chutney, sambar, and the works.”
Reading Passages from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Thommo
Chapter 2 – Chief Bromden observes McMurphy’s entry into the asylum and keeps mental notes
“They showered me this morning at the courthouse and last night at the jail. And I swear I believe they’d of washed my ears for me on the taxi ride over if they coulda found the vacilities. Hoo boy, seems like everytime they ship me someplace I gotta get scrubbed down before, after, and during the operation. I’m gettin’ so the sound of water makes me start gathering up my belongings. And get back away from me with that thermometer, Sam, and give me a minute to look my new home over; I never been in a Institute of Psychology before.” The patients look at one another’s puzzled faces, then back to the door, where his voice is still coming in. Talking louder’n you’d think he needed to if the black boys were anywhere near him. He sounds like he’s way above them, talking down, like he’s sailing fifty yards overhead, hollering at those below on the ground. He sounds big. I hear him coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks, and he sure don’t slide; he’s got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there with the guys looking at him.
“Good mornin’, buddies.”
There’s a paper Halloween bat hanging on a string above his head; he reaches up and flicks it so it spins around.
“Mighty nice fall day.”
He talks a little the way Papa used to, voice loud and full of hell, but he doesn’t look like Papa; Papa was a full-blood Columbia Indian - a chief - and hard and shiny as a gunstock. This guy is redheaded with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, been needing cut a long time, and he’s broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and he’s hard in a different kind of way from Papa, kind of the way a baseball is hard under the scuffed leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody laid him a good one in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam. He stands there waiting, and when nobody makes a move to say anything to him he commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there’s nothing funny going on. But it’s not the way that Public Relation laughs, it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years.
He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. He laces his fingers over his belly without taking his thumbs out of his pockets. I see how big and beat up his hands are. Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, and all, is stunned dumb by him and his laughing. There’s no move to stop him, no move to say anything. He laughs till he’s finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound hovers around him, the way the sound hovers around a big bell just quit ringing - it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles and swaggers, in the way he talks.
“My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I’m a gambling fool.” He winks and sings a little piece of a song: “‘… and whenever I meet with a deck a cards I lays … my money … down,’” and laughs again.
Geeta
From the Intro to the Novel
Once when Kesey was leaving the Pendleton Roundup with his fatherThe asylum, in Kesey’s world, pre, an Indian, a knife between his teeth deliberately ran into an oncoming diesel truck brining piping to the dam project. The suicide left its own mark on Kesey who had witnessed a man willing to make the greatest sacrifice in honour of a way of life, a way of life no developer could buy from him. In a perverse way the Indian embodied Thoreau’s view that in “wildness there is preservation of the world.” The dam presents machinery that that destroys one way of life in service to another. The asylum in Kesey’s world, performs a similar task. Is nature though any different?
Ch 3 – Chief describes what happened to a couple of inmates whose Electro Shock Therapy left them badly scarred
But there are some of us Chronics that the staff made a couple of mistakes on years back, some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got changed over. Ellis is a Chronic came in an Acute and got fouled up bad when they overloaded him in that filthy brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he’s nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, in the same shape, arms out, palms cupped, with the same horror on his face. He’s nailed like that on the wall, like a stuffed trophy. They pull the nails when it’s time to eat or time to drive him in to bed when they want him to move so’s I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when roll check came around.
Ruckly is another Chronic came in a few years back as an Acute, but him they overloaded in a different way: they made a mistake in one of their head installations. He was being a holy nuisance all over the place, kicking the black boys and biting the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to be fixed. They strapped him to that table, and the last anybody saw of him for a while was just before they shut the door on him; he winked, just before the door closed, and told the black boys as they backed away from him, “You’ll pay for this, you damn tarbabies.”
And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later, bald and the front of his face an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs stitched one above each eye. You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside like blown fuses. All day now he won’t do a thing but hold an old photograph up in front of that burned-out face, turning it over and over in his cold fingers, and the picture wore gray as his eyes on both sides with all his handling till you can’t tell any more what it used to be.
(The staff, now, they consider Ruckly one of their failures, but I’m not sure but what he’s better off than if the installation had been perfect. The installations they do nowadays are generally successful. The technicians got more skill and experience. No more of the button holes in the forehead, no cutting at all - they go in through the eye sockets. Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back a few weeks later with black-and-blue eyes like he’d been in a fistfight, and he’s the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing you ever saw. He’ll maybe even go home in a month or two, a hat pulled low over the face of a sleepwalker wandering round in a simple, happy dream. A success, they say, but I say he’s just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure, like Ruckly sitting there fumbling and drooling over his picture. He never does much else. The dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by leaning close and asking, “Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight?” Ruckly’s head comes up. Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery. He turns red and his veins clog up at one end. This puffs him up so he can just barely make a little whistling sound in his throat. Bubbles squeeze out the corner of his mouth, he’s working his jaw so hard to say something. When he finally does get to where he can say his few words it’s a low, choking noise to make your skin crawl - “Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife!” and passes out on the spot from the effort.)
Shoba
Ch 3 – McMcMurphy makes the acquaintance of Chief Bromden and Billy Babbit, as the Chief sizes him up
I’m the last one. Still strapped in the chair in the corner. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and hooks his thumbs in his pockets again and leans back to laugh, like he sees something funnier about me than about anybody else. All of a sudden I was scared he was laughing because he knew the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, staring straight ahead as though I couldn’t hear a thing, was all an act.
“Hooeee,” he said, “look what we got here.”
I remember all this part real clear. I remember the way he closed one eye and tipped his head back and looked down across that healing wine-colored scar on his nose, laughing at me. I thought at first that he was laughing because of how funny it looked, an Indian’s face and black, oily Indian’s hair on somebody like me. I thought maybe he was laughing at how weak I looked. But then’s when I remember thinking that he was laughing because he wasn’t fooled for one minute by my deaf-and-dumb act; it didn’t make any difference how cagey the act was, he was onto me and was laughing and winking to let me know it. “What’s your story, Big Chief? You look like Sittin’ Bull on a sitdown strike.” He looked over to the Acutes to see if they might laugh about his joke; when they just sniggered he looked back to me and winked again. “What’s your name, Chief?”
Billy Bibbit called across the room. “His n-n-name is Bromden. Chief Bromden. Everybody calls him Chief Buh-Broom, though, because the aides have him sweeping a l-large part of the time. There’s not mmuch else he can do, I guess. He’s deaf.” Billy put his chin in hands.
“If I was d-d-deaf” - he sighed - “I would kill myself.”
McMurphy kept looking at me. “He gets his growth, he’ll be pretty good-sized, won’t he? I wonder how tall he is.”
“I think somebody m-m-measured him once at s-six feet seven; but even if he is big, he’s scared of his own sh-sh-shadow. Just a bibig deaf Indian.”
“When I saw him sittin’ here I thought he looked some Indian. But Bromden ain’t an Indian name. What tribe is he?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “He was here wh-when I c-came.”
“I have information from the doctor,” Harding said, “that he is only half Indian, a Columbia Indian, I believe. That’s a defunct Columbia Gorge tribe. The doctor said his father was the tribal leader, hence this fellow’s title, ‘Chief.’ As to the ‘Bromden’ part of the name, I’m afraid my knowledge in Indian lore doesn’t cover that.”
McMurphy leaned his head down near mine where I had to look at him. “Is that right? You deef, Chief?”
“He’s de-de-deef and dumb.”
McMurphy puckered his lips and looked at my face a long time. Then he straightened back up and stuck his hand out. “Well, what the hell, he can shake hands can’t he? Deef or whatever. By God, Chief, you may be big, but you shake my hand or I’ll consider it an insult. And it’s not a good idea to insult the new bull goose loony of the hospital.”
When he said that he looked back over to Harding and Billy and made a face, but he left that hand in front of me, big as a dinner plate. I remember real clear the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he’d worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; there was a dirty Band-Aid on the middle knuckle, peeling up at the edge. All the rest of the knuckles were covered with scars and cuts, old and new. I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone from hefting the wooden handles of axes and hoes, not the hand you’d think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was worked in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West. That palm made a scuffing sound against my hand. I remember the fingers were thick and strong closing over mine, and my hand commenced to feel peculiar and went to swelling up out there on my stick of an arm, like he was transmitting his own blood into it. It rang with blood and power:
Priya
Ch 5 – McMurphy tries to foment revolt among the inmates
“This world ... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn’t challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?”
He lets go McMurphy’s hand and leans back and crosses his legs, takes another long pull off the cigarette. He pulls the cigarette from his thin crack of a smile, and the laugh starts up again - eee-eee-eee, like a nail coming out of a plank.
“Mr. McMurphy ... my friend ... I’m not a chicken, I’m a rabbit. The doctor is a rabbit. Cheswick there is a rabbit. Billy Bibbit is a rabbit. All of us in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees, hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, we’re not in here because we are rabbits - we’d be rabbits wherever we were - we’re all in here because we can’t adjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place.”
“Man, you’re talkin’ like a fool. You mean to tell me that you’re gonna sit back and let some old blue-haired woman talk you into being a rabbit?”
“Not talk me into it, no. I was born a rabbit. Just look at me. I simply need the nurse to make me happy with my role.”
“You’re no damned rabbit!”
“See the ears? the wiggly nose? the cute little button tail?” “You’re talking like a crazy ma -”
“Like a crazy man? How astute.”
“Damn it, Harding, I didn’t mean it like that. You ain’t crazy that way. I mean - hell, I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell you’re not any crazier than the average asshole on the street -”
“Ah yes, the asshole on the street.”
“But not, you know, crazy like the movies paint crazy people. You’re just hung up and - kind of -”
“Kind of rabbit-like, isn’t that it?”
“Rabbits, hell! Not a thing like rabbits, goddammit.”
“Mr. Bibbit, hop around for Mr. McMurphy here. Mr. Cheswick, show him how furry, you are.”
Billy Bibbit and Cheswick change into hunched-over white rabbits, right before my eyes, but they are too ashamed to do any of the things Harding told them to do.
Friend ... you ... may be a wolf.”
“Goddammit, I’m no wolf and you’re no rabbit. Hoo, I never heard such -”
“You have a very wolfy roar.”
With a loud hissing o breath McMurphy turns from Harding to the rest of the Acutes standing around. “Here; all you guys. What the hell is the matter with you? You ain’t as crazy as all this, thinking you’re some animal.”
“No,” Cheswick says and steps in beside McMurphy. “No, by God, not me. I’m not any rabbit.”
“That’s the boy, Cheswick. And the rest of you, let’s just knock it off. Look at you, talking yourself into running scared from some fifty- year-old woman. What is there she can do to you, anyway?”
“Yeah, what?” Cheswick says and glares around at the others.
“She can’t have you whipped. She can’t burn you with hot irons. She can’t tie you to the rack. They got laws about that sort of thing nowadays; this ain’t the Middle Ages. There’s not a thing in the world that she can -”
“Well, when she asks one of those questions, why don’t you tell her to up and go to hell?”
“Yeah,” Cheswick says, shaking his fist, “tell her to up and go to hell.”
“So then what, Mack? She’d just come right back with ‘Why do you seem so upset by that par-tik-uler question, Patient McMurphy?’”
“So, you tell her to go to hell again. Tell them all to go to hell. They still haven’t hurt you.”
The Acutes are crowding closer around him. Fredrickson answers this time. “Okay, you tell her that and you’re listed as Potential Assaultive and shipped upstairs to the Disturbed ward. I had it happen. Three times. Those poor goofs up there don’t even get off the ward to go to the Saturday afternoon movie. They don’t even have a TV.”
“And, my friend, if you continue to demonstrate such hostile tendencies, such as telling people to go to hell, you get lined up to go to the Shock Shop, perhaps even on to greater things, an operation, an -”
“Damn it, Harding, I told you I’m not up on this talk.”
“The Shock Shop, Mr. McMurphy, is jargon for the EST machine, the Electro Shock Therapy. A device that might be said to do the work of the sleeping pill, the electric chair, and the torture rack. It’s a clever little procedure, simple, quick, nearly painless it happens so fast, but no one ever wants another one. Ever.”
Arundhaty
Ch 15 – Billy’s shame, and Chief Bromden’s memory of his boyhood and his Papa going to seed
“And even when I pr-proposed, I flubbed it. I said ‘Huh-honey, will you muh-muh-muh-muh-muh …’ till the girl broke out l-laughing.” Nurse’s voice, I can’t see where it comes from: “Your mother has spoken to me about this girl, Billy. Apparently she was quite a bit beneath you. What would you speculate it was about her that frightened you so, Billy?”
“I was in luh-love with her.”
I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He has to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can’t fix your stuttering. I can’t wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can’t give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness till what little dignity you got left is gone and you shrink up to nothing from humiliation, I can’t do anything about that, either. At Anzio, I saw a buddy of mine tied to a tree fifty yards from me, screaming for water, his face blistered in the sun. They wanted me to try to go out and help him. They’d of cut me in half from that farmhouse over there.
Put your face away, Billy.
They keep filing past.
It’s like each face was a sign like one of those “I’m Blind” signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say “I’m tired” or “I’m scared” or “I’m dying of a bum liver” or “I’m all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time.” I can read all the signs, it don’t make any difference how little the print gets. Some of the faces are looking around at one another and could read the other fellow’s if they would, but what’s the sense? The faces blow past in the fog like confetti.
I’m further off than I’ve ever been. This is what it’s like to be dead. I guess this is what it’s like to be a Vegetable; you lose yourself in the fog. You don’t move. They feed your body till it finally stops eating; then they burn it. It’s not so bad. There’s no pain. I don’t feel much of anything other than a touch of chill I figure will pass in time.
I see my commanding officer pinning notices on the bulletin board, what we’re to wear today. I see the US Department of Interior bearing down on our little tribe with a gravel-crushing machine.
I see Papa come loping out of a draw and slow up to try and take aim at a big six-point buck springing off through the cedars. Shot after shot puffs out of the barrel, knocking dust all around the buck. I come out of the draw behind Papa and bring the buck down with my second shot just as it starts climbing the rimrock. I grin at Papa.
I never knew you to miss a shot like that before, Papa. Eye’s gone, boy. Can’t hold a bead. Sights on my gun just now was shakin’ like a dog shittin’ peach pits.
Papa, I’m telling you: that cactus moon of Sid’s is gonna make you old before your time.
A man drinks that cactus moon of Sid’s boy, he’s already old before his time. Let’s go gut that animal out before the flies blow him. That’s not even happening now. You see? There’s nothing you can do about a happening out of the past like that.
Zakia
Ch 22 – Many of the inmates are there by choice – McMurphy can’t understand why they don’t want to leave
I got just as much to lose hassling that old buzzard as you do.” He grins and winks down his nose and digs Harding in the ribs with his thumb, like he’s finished with the whole thing but no hard feelings, when Harding says something else.
“No. You’ve got more to lose than I do, my friend.”
Harding’s grinning again, looking with that skitterish sideways look of a jumpy mare, a dipping, rearing motion of the head. Everybody moves down a place. Martini comes away from the X-ray screen, buttoning his shirt and muttering, “I wouldn’t of believed it if I hadn’t saw it,” and Billy Bibbit goes to the black glass to take Martini’s place. “You have more to lose than I do,” Harding says again. “I’m voluntary. I’m not committed.”
McMurphy doesn’t say a word. He’s got that same puzzled look on his face like there’s something isn’t right, something he can’t put his finger on. He just sits there looking at Harding, and Harding’s rearing smile fades and he goes to fidgeting around from McMurphy staring at him so funny. He swallows and says, “As a matter of fact, there are only a few men on the ward who are committed. Only Scanlon and - well, I guess some of the Chronics. And you. Not many commitments in the whole hospital. No, not many at all.”
Then he stops, his voice dribbling away under McMurphy’s eyes. After a bit of silence McMurphy says softly, “Are you bullshitting me?” Harding shakes his head. He looks frightened. McMurphy stands up in the hall and says, “Are you guys bullshitting me!”
Nobody’ll say anything. McMurphy walks up and down in front of that bench, running his hand around in that thick hair. He walks all the way to the back of the line, then all the way to the front, to the X-ray machine. It hisses and spits at him.
“You, Billy - you must be committed, for Christsakes!”
Billy’s got his back to us, his chin up on the black screen, standing on tiptoe. No, he says into the machinery.
“Then why? Why? You’re just a young guy! You oughta be out running around in a convertible, bird-dogging girls. All of this” - he sweeps his hand around him again - “why do you stand for it?”
Billy doesn’t say anything, and McMurphy turns from him to another couple of guys.
“Tell me why. You gripe, you bitch for weeks on end about how you can’t stand this place, can’t stand the nurse or anything about her, and all the time you ain’t committed. I can understand it with some of those old guys on the ward. They’re nuts. But you, you’re not exactly the everyday man on the street, but you’re not nuts.”
They don’t argue with him. He moves on to Sefelt.
“Sefelt, what about you? There’s nothing wrong with you but you have fits. Hell, I had an uncle who threw conniptions twice as bad as yours and saw visions from the Devil to boot, but he didn’t lock himself in the nuthouse. You could get along outside if you had the guts -”
“Sure!” It’s Billy, turned from the screen, his face boiling tears.
“Sure!” he screams again. “If we had the g-guts! I could go outside to-today, if I had the guts. My m-m-mother is a good friend of M-Miss Ratched, and I could get an AMA signed this afternoon, if I had the guts!”
Devika
Chapter 23 – Nurse Ratched takes away a privilege, but McMurphy smashes the nurse station glass and takes a pack of cigarettes owing to him
“We must take away a privilege. And after careful consideration of the circumstances of this rebellion, we’ve decided that there would be a certain justice in taking away the privilege of the tub room that you men have been using for your card games during the day. Does this seem unfair?”
Her head didn’t move. She didn’t look. But one by one everybody else looked at him sitting there in his corner. Even the old Chronics, wondering why everybody had turned to look in one direction, stretched out their scrawny necks like birds and turned to look at McMurphy - faces turned to him, full of a naked, scared hope. That single thin note in my head was like tires speeding down a pavement.
He was sitting straight up in his chair, one big red finger scratching lazily at the stitchmarks run across his nose. He grinned at everybody looking at him and took his cap by the brim and tipped it politely, then looked back at the nurse.
“So, if there is no discussion on this ruling, I think the hour is almost over …”
She paused again, took a look at him herself. He shrugged his shoulders and with a loud sigh slapped both hands down on his knees and pushed himself standing out of the chair. He stretched and yawned and scratched the nose again and started strolling across the day-room floor to where she sat by the Nurses’ Station, heisting his pants with his thumbs as he walked. I could see it was too late to keep him from doing whatever fool thing he had in mind, and I just watched, like everybody else. He walked with long steps, too long, and he had his thumbs hooked in his pockets again. The iron in his boot heels cracked lightning out of the tile. He was the logger again, the swaggering gambler, the big redheaded brawling Irishman, the cowboy out of the TV set walking down the middle of the street to meet a dare.
The Big Nurse’s eyes swelled out white as he got close. She hadn’t reckoned on him doing anything. This was supposed to be her final victory over him, supposed to establish her rule once and for all. But here he comes and he’s big as a house!
She started popping her mouth and looking for her black boys, scared to death, but be stopped before he got to her. He stopped in front of her window and he said in his slowest, deepest drawl how he figured he could use one of the smokes he bought this mornin’, then ran his hand through the glass.
The glass came apart like water splashing, and the nurse threw her hands to her ears. He got one of the cartons of cigarettes with his name on it and took out a pack, then put it back and turned to where the Big Nurse was sitting like a chalk statue and very tenderly went to brushing the slivers of glass off her hat and shoulders.
“I’m sure sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Gawd but I am. That window glass was so spick and span I com-pletely forgot it was there.” It took just a couple of seconds. He turned and left her sitting there with her face shifting and jerking and walked back across the day room to his chair, lighting up a cigarette.
The ringing that was in my head had stopped.
Gopa
Ch 24 – Chief Bromden surrenders his mute act with McMurphy and they talk about the chewing gum stuck on his bed’s underside.
“I thought of something to say to him, but the only thing that came to my mind was the kind of thing one man can’t say to another because it sounds wrong in words.”
The black boy got up and sat on the edge of my bed. He tapped the flashlight against his teeth, grinning and giggling. The light lit his face up like a black jack o’lantern.
“Well, let me tell you about this gum,” he said and leaned close to McMurphy like an old chum. “You see, for years I been wondering where Chief Bromden got his chewin’ gum - never havin’ any money for the canteen, never havin’ anybody give him a stick that I saw, never askin’ Public Relations - so I watched, and I waited. And look here.” He got back on his knees and lifted the edge of my bedspread and shined the light under. “How ’bout that? I bet they’s pieces of gum under here been used a thousand times!”
This tickled McMurphy. He went to giggling at what he saw. The black boy held up the sack and rattled it, and they laughed some more about it. The black boy told McMurphy good night and rolled the top of the sack like it was his lunch and went off somewhere to hide it for later.
“Chief?” McMurphy whispered. “I want you to tell me something.” And he started to sing a little song, a hillbilly song, popular a long time ago: “‘Oh, does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?’”
At first I started getting real mad. I thought he was making fun of me like other people had.
“‘When you chew it in the morning,’” he sang in a whisper, “‘will it be too hard to bite?’”
But the more I thought about it the funnier it seemed to me. I tried to stop it but I could feel I was about to laugh - not at McMurphy’s singing, but at my own self.
“‘This question’s got me goin’, won’t somebody set me right; does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost o-ver niiiite?’” He held out that last note and twiddled it down me like a feather. I couldn’t help but start to chuckle, and this made me scared I’d get to laughing and not be able to stop. But just then McMurphy jumped off his bed and went to rustling through his nightstand, and I hushed. I clenched my teeth, wondering what to do now. It’d been a long time since I’d let anyone hear me do any more than grunt or bellow. I heard him shut the bedstand, and it echoed like a boiler door. I heard him say, “Here,” and something lit on my bed. Little. Just the size of a lizard or a snake …
“Juicy Fruit is the best I can do for you at the moment, Chief. Package I won off Scanlon pitchin’ pennies.” And he got back in bed. And before I realized what I was doing, I told him Thank you. He didn’t say anything right off. He was up on his elbow, watching me the way he’d watched the black boy, waiting for me to say something else. I picked up the package of gum from the bedspread and held it in my hand and told him Thank you.
It didn’t sound like much because my throat was rusty and my tongue creaked. He told me I sounded a little out of practice and laughed at that. I tried to laugh with him, but it was a squawking sound, like a pullet trying to crow. It sounded more like crying than laughing.
He told me not to hurry, that he had till six-thirty in the morning to listen if I wanted to practice. He said a man been still long as me probably had a considerable lot to talk about, and he lay back on his pillow and waited. I thought for a minute for something to say to him, but the only thing that came to my mind was the kind of thing one man can’t say to another because it sounds wrong in words.
Joe
Ch 25 – Going Fishing
And McMurphy was just laughing. Harding finally saw McMurphy wasn’t going to do anything, so he got the gaff and jerked my fish into the boat with a clean, graceful motion like he’s been boating fish all his life. He’s big as my leg, I thought, big as a fence post! I thought, He’s bigger’n any fish we ever got at the falls. He’s springing all over the bottom of the boat like a rainbow gone wild! Smearing blood and scattering scales like little silver dimes, and I’m scared he’s gonna flop overboard. McMurphy won’t make a move to help. Scanlon grabs the fish and wrestles it down to keep it from flopping over the side. The girl comes running up from below, yelling it’s her turn, dang it, grabs my pole, and jerks the hook into me three times while I’m trying to tie on a herring for her.
“Chief, I’ll be damned if I ever saw anything so slow! Ugh, your thumb’s bleeding. Did that monster bite you? Somebody fix the Chief’s thumb - hurry!”
“Here we go into them again,” George yells, and I drop the line off the back of the boat and see the flash of the herring vanish in the dark blue-gray charge of a salmon and the line go sizzling down into the water. The girl wraps both arms around the pole and grits her teeth. “Oh no you don’t, dang you!
Oh no …!” She’s on her feet, got the butt of the pole scissored in her crotch and both arms wrapped below the reel and the reel crank knocking against her as the line spins out: “Oh no you don’t!” She’s still got on Billy’s green jacket, but that reel’s whipped it. She’s and everybody on board sees the T-shirt she had on is gone - everybody gawking, trying to play his own fish, dodge mine slamming around the boat bottom, with the crank of that reel fluttering her breast at such a speed the nipple’s just red blur!
Billy jumps to help. All he can think to do is reach around from behind and help her squeeze the pole tighter in between her breasts until the reel’s finally stopped by nothing more than the pressure of her flesh. By this time she’s flexed so taut and her breasts look so firm I think she and Billy could both turn loose with their hands and arms and she’d still keep hold of that pole.
This scramble of action holds for a space, a second there on the sea - the men yammering and struggling and cussing and trying to tend their poles while watching the girl; the bleeding, crashing battle between Scanlon and my fish at everybody’s feet; the lines all tangled and shooting every which way with the doctor’s glasses-on-a-string tangled and dangling from one line ten feet off the back of the boat, fish striking at the flash of the lens, and the girl cussing for all she’s worth and looking now at her bare breasts, one white and one smarting red - and George takes his eye off where he’s going and runs the boat into that log and kills the engine.
While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water - laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because 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.
KumKum
Ch 26 – 3 small paragraphs
The Big Nurse had her next maneuver under way the day after the fishing trip. The idea had come to her when she was talking to McMurphy the day before about how much money he was making off the fishing trip and other little enterprises along that line. She had worked the idea over that night, looking at it from every direction this time until she was dead sure it could not fail, and all the next day she fed hints around to start a rumor and have it breeding good before she actually said anything about it. …
The nurse got the wondering started by pasting up a statement of the patients’ financial doings over the last few months; it must have taken her hours of work digging into records. It showed a steady drain out of the funds of all the Acutes, except one. His funds had risen since the day he came in. …
Harding finally brought the conversation into the open. “My friends, thou protest too much to believe the protesting. You are all believing deep inside your stingy little hearts that our Miss Angel of Mercy Ratched is absolutely correct in every assumption she made today about McMurphy. You know she was, and so do I. But why deny it? Let’s be honest and give this man his due instead of secretly criticizing his capitalistic talent. What’s wrong with him making a little profit? We’ve all certainly got our money’s worth every time he fleeced us, haven’t we? He’s a shrewd character with an eye out for a quick dollar. He doesn’t make any pretense about his motives, does he? Why should we? He has a healthy and honest attitude about his chicanery, and I’m all for him, just as I’m for the dear old capitalistic system of free individual enterprise, comrades, for him and his downright bullheaded gall and the American flag, bless it, and the Lincoln Memorial and the whole bit. Remember the Maine, P. T. Barnum and the Fourth of July. I feel compelled to defend my friend’s honor as a good old red, white, and blue hundred-per-cent American con man. Good guy, my foot. McMurphy would be embarrassed to absolute tears if he were aware of some of the simon-pure motives people had been claiming were behind some of his dealings. He would take it as a direct effrontery to his craft.”
Geetha
Ch 27 – A nurse salves their wounds after McMurphy and the Chief take out the ward boys in a fight
I was glad when a little lap nurse came to take us into the Nurses’ Station and I got a chance to sit and rest.
She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted - it hadn’t occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.
The nurse - about as big as the small end of nothing whittled to a fine point, as McMurphy put it later - undid our cuffs and gave McMurphy a cigarette and gave me a stick of gum. She said she remembered that I chewed gum. I didn’t remember her at all. McMurphy smoked while she dipped her little hand full of pink birthday candles into a jar of salve and worked over his cuts, flinching every time he flinched and telling him she was sorry. She picked up one of his hands in both of hers and turned it over and salved his knuckles. “Who was it?” she asked, looking at the knuckles. “Was it Washington or Warren?”
McMurphy looked up at her. “Washington,” he said and grinned. “The Chief here took care of Warren.”
She put his hand down and turned to me. I could see the little bird bones in her face. “Are you hurt anywhere?” I shook my head. “What about Warren and Williams?”
McMurphy told her he thought they might be sporting some plaster the next time she saw them. She nodded and looked at her feet. “It’s not all like her ward,” she said. “A lot of it is, but not all. Army nurses, trying to run an Army hospital. They are a little sick themselves. I sometimes think all single nurses should be fired after they reach thirty-five.”
“At least all single Army nurses,” McMurphy added.
Saras
Ch 29 McMurphy attacks Big Nurse after Billy’s death
First I had a quick thought to try to stop him, talk him into taking what he’d already won and let her have the last round, but another, bigger thought wiped the first thought away completely. I suddenly realized with a crystal certainty that neither I nor any of the half-score of us could stop him. That Harding’s arguing or my grabbing him from behind, or old Colonel Matterson’s teaching or Scanlon’s griping, or all of us together couldn’t rise up and stop him.
We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes.
We made him stand and hitch up his black shorts like they were horsehide chaps, and push back his cap with one finger like it was a ten-gallon Stetson, slow, mechanical gestures - and when he walked across the floor you could hear the iron in his bare heels ring sparks out of the tile.
Only at the last - after he’d smashed through that glass door, her face swinging around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever even imagined, warm and pink in the light - only at the last, after the officials realized that the three black boys weren’t going to do anything but stand and watch and they would have to beat him off without their help, doctors and supervisors and nurses prying those heavy red fingers out of the white flesh of her throat as if they were her neck bones, jerking him backward off of her with a loud heave of breath, only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not.
He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out:
A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrendered defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care any more about anything but himself and his dying.
Pamela
Ch 29 – The Chief escapes after the mercy killing of McMurphy
The big, hard body had a tough grip on life. It fought a long time against having it taken away, flailing and thrashing around so much I finally had to lie full length on top of it and scissor the kicking legs with mine while I mashed the pillow into the face. I lay there on top of the body for what seemed days. Until the thrashing stopped. Until it was still a while and had shuddered once and was still again. Then I rolled off. I lifted the pillow, and in the moonlight I saw the expression hadn’t changed from the blank, dead-end look the least bit, even under suffocation. I took my thumbs and pushed the lids down and held them till they stayed. Then I lay back on my bed.
I lay for a while, holding the covers over my face, and thought I was being pretty quiet, but Scanlon’s voice hissing from his bed let me know I wasn’t.
“Take it easy, Chief,” he said. “Take it easy. It’s okay.”
“Shut up,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
It was quiet a while; then I heard him hiss again and ask, “Is it finished?”
I told him yeah.
“Christ,” he said then, “she’ll know. You realize that, don’t you? Sure, nobody’ll be able to prove anything - anybody coulda kicked off in post-operative like he was, happens all the time - but her, she’ll know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Was I you, Chief, I’d breeze my tail outa here. Yessir. I tell you what. You leave outa here, and I’ll say I saw him up and moving around after you lift and cover you that way. That’s the best idea, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yeah, just like that. Just ask ’em to unlock the door and let me out.”
“No. He showed you how one time, if you think back. That very first week. You remember?”
I didn’t answer him, and be didn’t say anything else, and it was quiet in the dorm again. I lay there a few minutes longer and then got up and started putting on my clothes. When I finished dressing I reached into McMurphy’s nightstand and got his cap and tried it on. It was too small, and I was suddenly ashamed of trying to wear it. I dropped it on Scanlon’s bed as I walked out of the dorm. He said,
“Take it easy, buddy,” as I walked out.
The moon straining through the screen of the tub-room windows showed the hunched, heavy shape of the control panel, glinted off the chrome fixtures and glass gauges so cold I could almost hear the click of it striking. I took a deep breath and bent over and took the levers. I heaved my legs under me and felt the grind of weight at my feet. I heaved again and heard the wires and connections tearing out of the floor. I lurched it up to my knees and was able, to get an arm around it and my other hand under it. The chrome was cold against my neck and the side of my head. I put my back toward the screen, then spun and let the momentum carry the panel through the Screen and window with a ripping crash. The glass splashed out in the moon, like a bright cold water baptizing the sleeping earth. Panting, I thought for a second about going back and getting Scanlon and some of the others, but then I heard the running squeak of the black boys’ shoes in the hall and I put my hand on the sill and vaulted after the panel, into the moonlight.
I ran across the grounds in the direction I remembered seeing the dog go, toward the highway. I remember I was taking huge strides as I ran, seeming to step and float a long ways before my next foot struck the earth. I felt like I was flying. Free.
That was so interesting Joe.I am awed by your ability to record every word and the details you add to the information in the book - like the kind of treatment,life of the Indians,picture of nature in the movie etc.I was wondering why you chose that bus as a background. Now I know.
ReplyDelete>record every word
ReplyDeleteI jot notes in normal times. In novel coronavirus times there’s the Record option in Zoom, in addition.
>details you add to the information in the book
There’s much material on the Web if you can to look up
>life of the Indians
I have always been interested in them because they have been more or less washed away from US history, destroyed by genocidal actions, and reduced to small numbers left in deep alcoholic and drug slumber.
But before the white settlers came they had a proud culture, history, and wisdom.