"Cliff Notes - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)
As the patients line up for their medication, we see a flashback to the time when Mr. Taber, the hated manipulator, refused to take the pills Nurse Flinn forces on him. (This seems to be an error on Kesey's part: at the opening of the scene it was implied that Taber left the ward before Nurse Flinn began to work there.) The Chief condenses a lengthy period of time into one scene, as Mr. Taber refuses his pills, hides, is discovered and sedated by the nurse and sexually assaulted by the orderlies, then taken by technicians for electro-shock therapy, and, it's hinted, "brain work"--a lobotomy.
NOTE: CUCKOO'S NEST AS COMIC STRIP The Chief describes the ward as being "like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys." Here we see Kesey giving us a clue to one of the literary techniques: many critics have pointed out the similarity of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to cartoons and comic strips, in its humor, its fast pace, and most of all in its characters who, as the Chief says, are flat. In outline they may resemble the people we see around us in the real world, but where real people possess a complicated mixture of sympathetic and unsympathetic qualities, flat characters are all good or all bad. They're larger than life, more vivid than life. As he shows us with the Chief's words, and in his description of the technicians as having "cartoon comedy speech," Kesey is well aware of what he's doing. But he lets us know that while his characters may be cartoon-simple, their plight is not cartoon-funny. Punch and Judy puppets may be "beat up by the Devil and swallowed headfirst by a smiling alligator"--but they'll return for the next show. The patients will not get that chance. Their defeat will be final.
After the Chief entertains us with a wild description of the PR man that makes him seem like a rubber toy, he remembers back to a time before he came to the hospital, and we see an example of the forces that make up the Combine. While in high school he toured a California cotton mill; like the hospital it was crammed with machines devoted to efficiency at the expense of human beings. A young black girl flirts with him, then asks him to rescue her from her life in the mill--to rescue her, in effect, from the Combine. But the Chief is powerless to help.
Like the cotton mill, Nurse Ratched's ward is just one small portion of the Combine, a place "for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches"--places that are themselves segments of the Combine. Now we learn Mr. Taber's fate. (And because Nurse Ratched classes McMurphy as Taber's equal, we wonder if this is a foreshadowing of McMurphy's fate.) Thanks to his lobotomy, he's no longer a manipulator, no longer an enemy of the Combine. Nor is he like Rucker: the operation has been perfected. Taber is a model citizen; a useful cog in the Combine. Even his death is machinelike, for he runs down after a determined number of years and is embalmed in thirty weight oil, like an auto part. These sorts of deaths are the final dismissal from the hospital ward and from the Combine; they please Nurse Ratched. What doesn't please her is the spirit that McMurphy has carried into the hospital as a new Admission: the spirit of life. The Chief knows she will do her best to destroy it.
^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 5
In this long scene we see in more detail how the ward operates. Though the story is still narrated by the Chief, the fog machine is not running at full power, which is to say that the Chief's account of the day's events is mostly straightforwardly true. He can still tune into reality, if he strains. One of these days, he admits, he'll give up and escape into the fog permanently, but this morning he wants to see how McMurphy will react to the ward--another sign that McMurphy may have some role in saving the Chief from his illness.
It's time for the daily Group Meeting. The Nurse leaves her watchful position in the Nurse's Station, and joins the patients in the day room. During the group meetings, patients are encouraged to discuss their problems with each other, under the supervision of Nurse Ratched and Dr. Spivey. Such group therapy is a common psychiatric treatment and often helpful, but in this scene we'll see how the Nurse manipulates the meetings to maintain her control over the patients.
One Chronic, old Pete Bancini, complains as he always does of being tired. The Nurse gets Billy Bibbit to quiet Pete, and then she steers the meeting to a discussion of Dale Harding, the patient who fought McMurphy for the title of Bull Goose Looney. Harding's problems, like those of so many in this book, are in great part sexual: although in scene three we were told he bragged about his wife's desire for him, we now see she apparently thinks him weak and effeminate, and his embarrassment over his lovely, pale hands hints that he fears her judgment is accurate.
McMurphy can't resist disrupting the meeting by making a lewd pun on the meaning of touch. In retaliation, Nurse Ratched reads his psychiatric record, which shows his life to be a mixture of courage, foolhardiness and stupidity. McMurphy beats the Nurse at her own game by joking about his rape conviction, making the doctor smile at his sexual prowess, and by warning the Nurse she had better not continue mispronouncing his name. Though the nurse believes McMurphy is a psychopath (a person whose illness prevents him from feeling any responsibility to family, friends, or society; one who thinks only of his immediate pleasure), Dr. Spivey can't help but be amused. He suggests that McMurphy may be faking mental illness simply to enjoy an easy life at the hospital. In fact, it has become obvious that this probably is McMurphy's intention; when he asks, "Do I look like a sane man?" doctor and reader alike are probably telling themselves, "Yes."
But to Nurse Ratched, anyone who causes her trouble is insane. She insists that the doctor help her regain control of the meeting. As it resumes, McMurphy becomes quiet, puzzled by the lack of laughter among the patients and the Nurse's control over them. Dr. Spivey enthusiastically discusses the theory which governs the ward: the therapeutic community. So they will learn how to function in the outside world, the patients are told to discuss their grievances and emotional problems freely with each other, and report on these discussions in the log book. "Our intention," the doctor says, "is to make this as much like your own democratic free neighborhoods as possible--a little world Inside that is a made-to-scale prototype of the big world Outside that you will one day be taking your place in again." The doctor's description of the community contradicts itself--what kind of "democratic free neighborhood" forces citizens to spy on each other? It's easy to see that, despite the democratic facade, the system is rigged to ensure Nurse Ratched's, and the Combine's, control.
As Dr. Spivey talks, the Chief remembers one occasion when the group meeting didn't go as planned. Trying to please Nurse Ratched, the patients competed with each other to see who could confess the most shameful secret, even if they had to invent one. This sick game is interrupted by Pete, the Chronic; his cry of "I'm tired" makes the patients feel ashamed because it represents the truth. Nurse Ratched sends the aides after Pete, but it's a tough fight; a victim of an accident at birth, Pete is too simple-minded to be vulnerable to the Combine. In the Chief's distorted vision, Pete's arm becomes a wrecking ball which exposes the machinery inside the hospital walls. But eventually Nurse Ratched sedates him, and he falls unconscious, never to speak the truth again.
The meeting ends when the doctor grows bored; he is less interested in curing people than in theories, and for this reason, too, he is useful to Nurse Ratched. The patients feel ashamed that once again they have been goaded into attacking one of their own, and McMurphy remains puzzled. He asks Harding if this afternoon's meeting was typical.
Harding is a man who uses his considerable intelligence in unintelligent attempts to deny the truth. Clearly upset by the meeting, he pretends confusion at McMurphy's question. When McMurphy compares the meeting to a pecking party--frenzied chickens pecking each other to death--he sneers that McMurphy doesn't know what he's talking about. Does McMurphy believe he is Freud, Jung, Maxwell Jones? (All three were famous early psychoanalysts.) He speaks the words the public relations man might use: "The staff desires a cure as much as we do. They aren't monsters. Miss Ratched may be a strict middle-aged lady, but she's not some kind of giant monster bent on sadistically pecking out our eyes."
McMurphy is ignorant of psychiatric theory (he mispronounces the famous names Harding has used to impress him), but he insists that the Group Meetings are not going to cure anyone. As for Nurse Ratched pecking out the patients' eyes, McMurphy says she wants to peck at their testicles--just as she's denied her own sexuality, she wants to deny the patients' theirs.
Harding, so upset that his embarrassing hands fly out of control, launches a defense of the Nurse that becomes in our eyes an attack more fierce than any McMurphy has made. "Our Nurse Ratched is a veritable angel of mercy," he announces, but his words are ironic, for each charitable act he describes only proves the Nurse's need for power. She acts on the outside just as she does in the ward.
Now we get a more realistic view of the way the Nurse operates, as McMurphy asks Harding questions we've probably been asking ourselves. How did Nurse Ratched acquire so much power? Doctor Spivey is as timid as his patients, Harding answers, and--in this hospital, doctors don't have the authority to hire or fire nurses--that power lies in the hands of a woman who is a friend of Nurse Ratched. And the Nurse's methods of wielding her authority are subtle--without ever making a direct accusation, she can insinuate that the doctor is a morphine addict, that patients have been masturbating, that Harding is a homosexual. Changing McMurphy's metaphor, Harding says the patients aren't chickens but timid cartoon rabbits (looking on, the Chief even sees Billy Bibbit and another patient, Cheswick, become rabbits briefly). They aren't even successful rabbits, for rabbits at least are famed for the sexual abilities the patients sadly lack.
Amazed at Harding's outburst, McMurphy tells him to be quiet. He can't believe that Billy and the other patients are crazy, and he tries to rally them against the nurse. But their fear of Nurse Ratched stops him. Billy again mentions suicide, and Harding explains what happens to troublemakers: they are taken to the Disturbed ward, or subjected to electroshock therapy--which, if they are unlucky, will leave them as ruined as Ellis or Chief Bromden, the latter a victim of more than two hundred treatments.
NOTE: MATRIARCHY IN CUCKOO'S NEST. "We are victims of a matriarchy here, my friend," Harding says as he explains Nurse Ratched's reign. A matriarchy is a society where power lies solely in the hands of women; throughout the book we'll see women who repress and destroy men's sexuality--and in the process destroy their power and freedom as well. This is perhaps the most controversial theme in the book, one that many feminist critics have found highly objectionable. Whether Kesey intended it so or not, it does seem that the Combine is primarily represented by women: Nurse Ratched, Chief Bromden's mother, Billy Bibbit's mother, and (to a lesser extent) Dale Harding's wife, Vera. They rob men of their dignity and manhood; in the Nurse's case, her power is presented in explicitly sexual terms--men can't become sexually aroused by her. If this is Kesey's complete view of women, it is a harsh, unfair one; in his defense, he does have McMurphy specifically stating that not all ball-cutters are women, and, in Scene 6, part one, that sexual repression is only part of a larger problem. There are also secondary female characters--the prostitute, Candy, the girl in the cotton mill, a Japanese-American nurse-who are portrayed sympathetically.
At the end of the discussion, we see how thoroughly the Nurse monitors her patients--she's been listening to and taping every word of the discussion.
But McMurphy thinks he can find a way around the Nurse. If he plays strictly by the ward rules, she can't send him to the Disturbed ward or for electroshock therapy. If he can anger her without violating any rules, he will win. As a gambling man, he wants to make the contest more interesting by taking bets on the outcome. He's cocky, confident of his success. Harding and the other Acutes place bets, but Harding throws cold water on McMurphy by reminding him, "You won't be going anyplace for awhile."
^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 6
The scene opens with an example of the black humor (humor also marked by the grotesque and the ironic) that we'll see often in the book. The Chief remembers one Christmas when Santa Claus visited the ward. It's likely the intruder was just a fat old man with a red nose, but in the Chief's remembrance he represents the generous spirit of Christmas, and as he is nabbed by the aides and imprisoned, (to leave six years later "clean-shaven and skinny as a pole") we wonder: if the hospital can destroy even Christmas, how can anything good survive?
Through the Chief's warped vision we see the control the Nurse maintains over the ward. She even masters time, occasionally making it go so fast that the view out the window turns from morning to night in seconds, then slowing it to a snail's pace. She likes to speed things up to make pleasant activities pass more quickly, and slow things down for unpleasant events, like the death of a patient next to the Chief. Of course the Chief is describing a familiar phenomenon--bad times seem to pass more slowly than good--but his "untrue" description reminds us of a deeper truth.
Today is different, though, because McMurphy is there. Time moves at a normal pace; even the fog is gone. Nurse Ratched's shift ends and another nurse arrives, and McMurphy plays cards with the patients. When he complains about the music being piped into the room, threatening to turn it off, he's warned that causing trouble will make him forfeit his bet. Meanwhile, the comparison of the piped music to a waterfall causes the Chief to remember a waterfall near the Indian village where he grew up: again, his memories of his Indian youth are clear and precise compared to his fog-shrouded present. (We'll see, too, the eventual--and important--fate of that waterfall.)
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