"Cliff Notes - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Nurse Ratched, confident of her complete control, announces from within her glass Nurse's Station (behind its windows she looks like a mechanical fortune teller) that the patients must be punished for their disobedience of three weeks before. She is closing the tub room where the card games are held.

No one says anything. The patients wait to see how McMurphy will react to this attack on his earliest improvement to the ward. At first McMurphy seems not to have noticed what the Nurse has said. But the Chief realizes that something is up. As McMurphy walks towards the Nurse's Station, "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." Nurse Ratched, frightened, looks for help. But McMurphy doesn't attack her directly. Instead he stops in front of the Nurse's Station, which with its polished windows and control panel is a symbol of all the power the Nurse and the Combine possess. Then he shatters the window--claiming that he wanted to get one of the cigarettes he bought that morning, and that the Nurse had made her patients scrub the glass so thoroughly he didn't notice the window was even there.

McMurphy is back in action. The football game the Chief was waiting for has begun, the ringing in his head has stopped.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: PART III

Part III consists of two scenes.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 1

McMurphy has returned with all his power to disrupt the Nurse's world, but for the moment she is not fighting back; she realizes that time will always be on her side. Meanwhile, McMurphy is making her life as difficult as he can. He forms a basketball team and in one game knocks an aide in the nose. He writes requests, ruining the Nurse's pen in the process, plants more obscene notes in the latrine, spoils her attempt to make the patients spy on each other by writing false stories about himself in her log book. When the window of the Nurse's Station is at last replaced, he breaks it again. What's more, the other Acutes are following his example.

McMurphy's next plan is to take a fishing trip. He and the other members of the ward will be accompanied by two "aunts" from Portland. Nurse Ratched, of course, opposes the idea; far from seeing its value as therapy, she sees the trip only as a threat to her control. To retain that control, she tries to destroy the patients' growing self-confidence, telling them repeatedly of the ocean's dangers. McMurphy turns her words against her: the roughness of the sea will be exhilarating; where she sees perils to fear he sees challenges to master. But she will have none of it.

The Nurse's warnings succeed in scaring many of the patients, and it seems McMurphy may not get enough passengers to pay for the boat trip. Though he has no money, the Chief would like to go. But he fears that signing up will be an admission that he isn't deaf and dumb; once that discovery was made, Nurse Ratched might be angry enough at his deception to make him deaf and dumb for real. Another of the ironies of life in the hospital: "I had to keep on acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all." In this strange world, to protect what you are, you may have to pretend to be the opposite.

The Chief lies in his bed thinking of the many years of his deception. It was, he says, other people "who first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all." Because he was an Indian, people assumed he was stupid. He remembers when, at age ten, he saw a car pull up to his house in the Indian village. The visitors aren't tourists, he knows, and they haven't come to buy fish, for tourists and shoppers are too frightened of Indians to venture so near.

Out of the car step two men and a woman, the woman, like Nurse Ratched, dressed in an outfit stiff as armor. They're looking for Chief Bromden's father, because they want to discuss with him the government's plans (the plans being the destruction of the village for a hydroelectric dam).

The young boy gets angry as he listens to the intruders, who talk freely because they don't realize he understands English--just as, years later, the hospital staff will speak freely thinking he is deaf. The Chief begins correcting the visitors' mistaken notions about Indian houses, but they pay no attention.

And now, perhaps for the first time in his life, fear and anger cause the Chief to have one of his hallucinations. He sees the sun become so bright it reveals the strangers to be machines that ignore words (like his) that don't fit their preconceived ideas.

The squawk of a guinea hen interrupts the hallucination. The two men decide to talk with the Chief's father, but the woman tells them not to. She has another plan. Here is another example of the evil power of matriarchy: the whitehaired lady reminds Chief Bromden of Nurse Ratched, and she acts much as Nurse Ratched does, with a sly knowledge of people's weak points. She realizes that the government will be able to defeat the Chief's father through his mother (the white woman whom we've already been told made the Chief's father small).

The visitors leave. As a final reminder of their ignorance, they call the tribe by the wrong name. (Navajos of course live in the Southwest, hundreds of miles from the Columbia River.)

The Chief is amazed he can remember so much with such clarity. In the first scene, we recall, the fear of the present seeped through to destroy his memories of the past; that hasn't happened here. Something about McMurphy and the idea of a fishing trip has cleared his mind. But the Chief's thoughts are interrupted by an aide cleaning up the gum Chief Bromden has for years stuck under his bed. In the neighboring bunk, McMurphy is angry at the disturbance of his sleep why couldn't the aide do this work earlier? But then he finds the collected gum amusing.

McMurphy knows the Chief isn't deaf, but this is only the second time he's shown his awareness of that fact. Now he starts to sing to the Chief a popular song, "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the Bedpost Overnight?" The Chief, though desperately wanting to laugh, is afraid to reveal his secret. But when McMurphy offers him a stick of gum he says "Thank you"--the first words he has spoken out loud in half a lifetime.

The Chief is out of practice at laughing and at talking, but McMurphy reassures him that he has all night to practice if he wants. The Chief remains silent, though--what he wants to say is something that would show his affection for McMurphy, but he is afraid it would sound odd. So he listens as McMurphy tells him about his own childhood experiences of staying silent while adults paid no attention to him, then getting his revenge. He asks if the Chief is playing the same game.

No, the Chief answers. He is too scared, too small. McMurphy objects that the Chief stands a head taller than any man in the ward. But we understand that the Chief's view of height and size has nothing to do with physical stature and everything to do with psychological strength. His father, so tall he was known as the Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, was made small by his mother. His mother stood only five-foot-nine, but she was a giant.

The Chief says that it wasn't only his mother who made his father small; it was the forces that make up what he calls the Combine. He explains to McMurphy the Combine's workings--how it destroyed the Indian village and waterfall for a dam, how it gave his father money but stole his self-respect. The Chief warns that McMurphy may suffer the same fate: the Combine will install machines to destroy him, just as it destroyed his father by reducing him to a pathetic drunk. The Chief admits that he's been "talking crazy," and McMurphy agrees that he has--but then adds that the Chief's "craziness" makes a certain sense. The Chief is so happy that someone has broken down the wall of fear that isolated him he wants to touch McMurphy, not out of sexual desire (though he briefly fears that is the case) but out of gratitude and love.

McMurphy asks the Chief if he wants to join the fishing trip, trying to heighten the Chief's interest by admitting the "aunts" from Portland are in fact prostitutes. When the Chief confesses that he has no money, McMurphy works out a deal that recalls his failed effort to lift the control panel in scene eleven, Part One, and that foreshadows the end of the book. McMurphy will pay for the Chief's trip, and he promises to make the Chief as big as he once was (which of course means giving the Chief back his self-respect). In return the Chief has to promise to lift the control panel. McMurphy plans to win bets on the stunt.

McMurphy describes the wonderful life the Chief will lead once he regains his size. This is McMurphy's Western, tall tale humor; he could be describing a modern Paul Bunyan: "Well well well, what giant's this here, takin' ten feet at a step and duckin' for telephone wires?" Women will pant after the Chief and men will be terrified. McMurphy's talk is convincing. As he leaves to add the Chief's name to the trip list, he lifts up the Chief's bedsheet. Bromden's erection is a sign of his recovery, his re-entry into the world of health and strength.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 2

This long scene depicts McMurphy's finest hour, an escape from the hospital into the outside world.

On the morning of the trip, the Chief is so excited (apparently as much by the chance to be with two prostitutes from Portland as by the fishing) he awakens even earlier than usual. The aides can't believe his name has been added to the list. He can't write, he can't even read, they laugh, and the newly confident Chief is so angry he walks away when they stick a broom at him as a reminder that he should resume his menial life as a floor-sweeper. The Chief is scared this small act of rebellion will be punished, but thanks to the ruckus McMurphy is making, the aides don't follow him into the day room.