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

Both in fact and in literature, mental hospitals have been seen as high places not of healing but of punishment. Perhaps the most infamous was London's Bedlam, the 18th-century institution whose name is now a synonym for chaos and confusion. The ward run by Nurse Ratched is not bedlam. As the public relations man announces on his tours, it is cheery and bright--not at all like the hospitals of the old days. Indeed, the very fact that citizens are concerned enough about the mentally ill to take tours of the facilities shows that conditions have at least superficially improved.

Yet we know from the Chief that conditions have not improved enough. The public relations man's speech is hypocritical. Portions of the hospital, like the Seclusion room, are dirty; the food (the unsalted mush the Chief sometimes gets) can be bad. More importantly, brutality, both physical and psychological, is rampant. In the first scene we saw the orderlies' pleasure in keeping Chief Bromden under their thumbs: "Big enough to eat apples off my head and he mine me like a baby." Now we're given evidence of sexual assaults against the patients.

The orderlies who frighten the Chief are in turn frightened of the Big Nurse, as of course the patients are too. Her weapons are not--yet--physical ones, but words and threats. The ward is divided into two sections: Acutes (patients who in the staffs opinion can be helped by treatment) and Chronics (those deemed incurable). Nurse Ratched plays on the fears of the Acutes by warning them they will become Chronics if they don't obey her rules. She also encourages the Acutes to spy on each other--by turning patient against patient, she prevents them from turning against her.

Into this grim, rigid setting comes the hero of the novel.

NOTE: MCMURPHY We saw clues to the Big Nurse's character in the first sentence about her; we now see clues to McMurphy's in the first sentence the Chief uses to describe him. He is "no ordinary admission."

McMurphy is painted in a way that shows how completely different he is from the patients who have entered the hospital before him. His voice is too loud: "He sounds like he's way above them, talking down, like he's sailing fifty yards overhead, hollering at those below on the ground." (That description may bring to mind a bird soaring overhead, and we'll see the image of birds, linked to flight and freedom, repeated throughout the book, even in the rhyme that provides its title.) McMurphy's voice reminds the Chief of his father, and though McMurphy doesn't look like the elder Indian (instead, with his red hair, he resembles the stereotypical hot-blooded Irishman), he is similarly toughened from hard outdoor work. Perhaps most important is McMurphy's laugh. The public relations man has a false, silly laugh; the Acute patients can only snicker in their fists. (Later we'll hear one, Harding, attempt a laugh and make only a sound "like a nail being crossbarred out of a plank of green pine." McMurphy's laugh is the first real laugh the Chief has heard in years, a brave indication of strength and sanity.

McMurphy's name, too, has meaning. Just as Ratched shows the nurse's machinelike personality, and Chief Broom the Indian's diminishment to a mere household object, McMurphy's initials hint at the effect he's about to have on the ward: R.P.M., identical to the acronym for revolutions per minute found on phonograph records. And a revolution is just what McMurphy will bring.

McMurphy, the new patient can't take a step without disrupting normal hospital procedure. He won't shower; he won't stand still to have his temperature taken. He ignores the division between Chronics and Acutes, greeting everyone like a sideshow pitchman.

Is he crazy? It doesn't seem so. He claims to be in the hospital only because a court ruled him psychotic, claims the ruling came only because he'd had too many fights and-too many women. He's glad to enter the hospital, he says; he expects an easier life than he found on the state work farm.

The memory of the frontier West is apparent in much of this book, which geographical clues tell us is set in Oregon. And just as the Chief reminds us of the Indian past, McMurphy with his bragging charm may remind us of the rough cowboy of Western novels and movies. His humor is a modernized version of the tall tales told by and about Western legends like Davy Crockett, Mike Finn, and Paul Bunyan. For example, in his mock showdown with Harding, the college-educated man who is president of the Patients' Council, he wins by bragging he's so crazy he voted for President Eisenhower not once but twice and is going to vote for him again. (The book is set just before the 1960 presidential election. Of course, Eisenhower, who won the 1952 and 1956 elections, could not run for a third term.)

Notice, too, the little McMurphy fights Harding for: Bull Goose Looney brings back the image of McMurphy's high-flying voice, and geese as symbols of freedom will recur often. Bull also implies the powerful sexuality that McMurphy possesses.

Initially McMurphy's antics unnerve the patients, but soon their fears give way to the pleasure of seeing someone disrupt the hospital routine. Even the Chronics seem amused, but when McMurphy approaches the Chief, the Indian's mood changes: the laughter that a moment before he enjoyed now seems frightening, a signal that tells McMurphy the Chief is not really deaf and dumb. This is doubtful (though McMurphy will guess the Chief's secret later), but it's a sign of the new patient's strong personality that the Chief believes it to be true.

The Chief shakes McMurphy's hand. All through the book hands will be used to indicate character, and in McMurphy's we see calloused traces of his entire hard-working, hard-fighting life. As for the Chief's hands, he is an enormous man-six-feet seven inches--and undoubtedly they are much larger than McMurphy's. But the Chief's illness has changed his perception of strength and size: to him, psychological weakness creates physical weakness, and he has been so damaged that he thinks of himself as small. However, when the two shake hands, the Chief feels power being transmitted from McMurphy to him, and sees his hand becoming larger--the first example of McMurphy's healing effect on the Chief.

The handshake is interrupted by the Big Nurse, who warns McMurphy that he must follow the same rules as everyone else.

NOTE: FORESHADOWING One of the literary techniques employed most successfully in the early pages of the novel is foreshadowing, or the use of small events to hint at more important events that occur later. The scene in which McMurphy enters the hospital is largely comic, but it contains examples of foreshadowing that give us indications of less comic events to come.

The first example is Billy Bibbit's comment, "If I was d-d-deaf, I would kill myself." Seemingly casual, Billy's thought of suicide will be repeated later--and, at the book's climax, acted on.

More elaborate foreshadowing can be seen in the characters of Ellis and Ruckley. Ellis is a victim of the already-mentioned Shock Shop--of electro-shock therapy, a treatment once used on certain types of mental patients, in which electricity is passed through the brain. Normally the treatments are short, and their effect, while disorienting, temporary. But in Ellis' case a mistake was made and permanent damage was done. Now he stands spread-armed against the wall, as if his hands had been nailed to the plaster. (The posture is purposely reminiscent of the crucified Christ: the connection between the Shock Shop and the crucifixion--and McMurphy as Christ--will be made more explicit later in the book.)

Ruckley is a victim of another once common treatment, the prefrontal lobotomy, in which a portion of the patient's brain is removed. Ruckley, operated on when the technique was still new, has been left unable to do anything but stare at a blank photograph. Now, the Chief says, the operation has been refined; patients are able to go home and lead normal lives of a sort. But the Chief wonders if this fate is any better than Ruckley's. This question, too, will reappear at the book's climax.

Ellis and Ruckley let us know that, while much of what happens in the hospital is wildly funny, human lives are at stake. At the end of the third scene, McMurphy has his first encounter with Nurse Ratched. Everyone must obey, she warns; McMurphy warns that he will do the opposite. The earlier showdown between McMurphy and Harding was a joke. This showdown is real. And while the battles between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched may seem trivial, fought as they are over toothpaste, the World Series, and fishing trips, the presence of Ellis and Ruckley are grim reminders that the war is deadly serious indeed.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 4

Scene 4 proves that Chief Bromden's trick of seeming to be deaf and dumb is a highly useful one--he can loiter, broom in hand, to catch conversations off-limits to patients. Nurse Ratched is discussing McMurphy with a silly junior nurse. She warns that the new patient is a manipulator, a psychologist's term for someone who thinks of nothing but his own gain. Because McMurphy has told us a bit of his history as gambler and fighter, we may see some truth in her diagnosis--though it seems rather too sinister for the laughing man we've just met.

There have been other manipulators in the hospital, Nurse Ratched remembers, but in the old days (before the improvements the public relations man noted) they could be handled more easily; one Mr. Taber was "an intolerable ward manipulator," but she defeated him. How? We don't know, but her satisfaction in the memory is disturbing. It's clear Nurse Ratched is convinced that anyone who threatens her rule is insane.

The Chief tells us that Nurse Ratched belongs to what he calls the Combine, a shadowy organization that seeks to regulate the world as completely as the Nurse regulates her ward. A combine can mean an organization working against the public interest; its more common usage denotes an agricultural machine. The Chief combines the two meanings of the word and sees the Combine's sinister power in mechanical terms. It's a fantasy, a symptom of his illness, of course--but we'll see that like his fantasies of the hospital, it also contains a great deal of truth about the way the modern world works.

How did Nurse Ratched attain so much power when she is only a nurse? She makes life difficult for doctors, forcing them to quit until she has found one timid enough to obey her. Similarly, she has tested orderly after orderly before locating three who will treat the patients with sufficient hatred.

NOTE: RACISM Some critics of Cuckoo's Nest have accused Kesey of racism in his treatment of the black orderlies, who throughout the book are described in unfavorable racial terms. As with the debate over Kesey's treatment of women (more on that later), this is an issue you will have to decide for yourself. Certainly the three aides are the major black characters in the novel, and they are portrayed as despicable people. In Kesey's defense, a valid reason (the rape of his mother) is given for the hatred of one of the aides, nor are any of them above racism themselves--they taunt the Chief for his Indian blood as readily as he taunts them for being black. And other minor black characters--the young girl the Chief meets in the cotton mill, the night aid, Mr. Turkle--are presented sympathetically.