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

As the Chief describes McMurphy playing cards, we receive additional insights into the new patient's character. He brags about his skill at the game, hamming it up like a riverboat gambler. But after a string of victories, he arranges to lose all his winnings. The patients understand what he's done, but they're still pleased: McMurphy's generosity has given them a little self-respect.

Now it is time for the patients to take their sleeping pills, but McMurphy disrupts this routine, too: the sight of him scares the night nurse into dropping pills and spilling water, and in the confusion, McMurphy is able to hide some of the drugs in his palm. As a result, the Chief for the first time in years will go to bed without being under the influence of sedating drugs. Just as important, McMurphy tricks the Chief into revealing that he isn't deaf and dumb: he can at least hear.

NOTE: THE USE OF SYMBOLS As McMurphy undresses, we see his shorts--black satin covered with white whales. He tells Chief Bromden the shorts come "from a co-ed at Oregon State, Chief, a literary major. She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol." A symbol, in literature, is a person or object that stands both for itself and for something else--another person, another object, an idea. For example, in the descriptions of the electro-shock therapy, the focus on the cross-shaped table and the electric crown of thorns are intended to symbolize Christ's crucifixion: the patients undergoing treatment there are in some way similar to Christ in their innocence and their suffering. And more elaborate symbolism specifically linking McMurphy to Christ comes at the end of the book. Now we're given another clear example of a symbol: the undershorts McMurphy is wearing are intended to remind you of Herman Melville's classic American novel, Moby Dick (itself a work of symbolism more complex than anything in Cuckoo's Nest), in which Captain Ahab chases an enormous white whale at the eventual cost of his ship and his life. Is McMurphy like the obsessed captain? Like the whale--a force of nature that can never be captured or known? Or is Kesey having a joke on literary majors and professors who spend too much time looking for symbols and who take them too seriously when they find them? After all, the whales are not real whales, just images on a pair of silly undershorts. McMurphy may sometimes resemble Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick, even Christ--but it's wise to remember that first and foremost he is McMurphy.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 7

Without his medication, the Chief sleeps restlessly, enduring a series of nightmares. The flow of bizarre sights reveals much about the Chief's life, and when, at the end of the scene he asks of them, "But if they don't exist, how can a man see them?" the answer is, they do exist: they are the truth, even if they didn't happen.

The Chief envisions the hospital as a tremendous machine that hums like a dam--and we'll see later that a hydroelectric dam played a cruel part in triggering the Chief's illness. Workers with waxen faces grab a Chronic patient, Blastic (whom we saw the orderlies abusing in Scene 4), hang him on a hook that dangles from the ceiling, and scalp him--the bared, opened skull revealing only the rust and ashes of a ruined machine, another of the Combine's errors. As the fog rolls in, the Chief glimpses the public relations man, laced into a woman's corset so tight it bloats his face--like so many in this book, he has denied his true sexuality. From the corset stays dangle what seem at first to be more scalps, but what are actually male genitals, reminders of McMurphy's warning of what the Nurse and the hospital want to do to the patients.

The Chief is comforted by Mr. Turkle, one of the few kindly aides in the hospital. Aides and doctors take the dead Mr. Blastic away, giving his body more care than they ever showed the living man.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 8

The Chief awakens the next morning, surprised that McMurphy is up before him, even more surprised that the new patient is singing. In this ward, songs are like laughter, never heard. The tunes McMurphy sings aren't given titles (they are American folk songs, "The Wagoner's Lad" and "The Roving Gambler"), but their lyrics show a man refusing to be tied down by a woman--exactly the situation McMurphy finds himself in now.

The Chief wonders why the Combine hasn't defeated McMurphy before this, and he speculates that the newcomer moved around too often to be snared. He thinks, too, that McMurphy may have survived by not caring about anyone, in a sense, agreeing with Nurse Ratched's diagnosis of him as a psychopath. We'll see later whether the Chief is correct.

Now, at this early hour, McMurphy is forced into the first of his battles with the hospital. He wants to brush his teeth, but the toothpaste is locked up until 6:45, McMurphy is amazed--why is toothpaste being guarded like a dangerous weapon? The aide answers in the way bureaucrats always answer: it's policy. The aide asks, "What do you s'pose it'd be like if evahbody was to brush their teeth whenever they took a notion to brush?"

In fact, this question doesn't seem completely absurd; some of the patients we've met in this ward might well decide to brush their teeth twenty-four hours a day. But McMurphy makes the question, and the aide, appear ridiculous, and he resourcefully defeats the aide by brushing his teeth with soap power. Angered by McMurphy, the aide takes his wrath out on Chief Bromden: the usual pattern in the hospital.

NOTE: ON LAUGHTER Here again we're reminded of the power of laughter. The Chief looks at McMurphy and recalls his father, who also could defeat people with jokes. He remembers a scene with his father talking to white visitors who want him to sign a contract--we'll find out later what that contract entails and its effect on the Chief's tribe. The Chief's father makes fun of the visitors by pretending to be just the man they think he is, an ignorant, superstitious savage. He tells them he can see geese (note the choice of bird), though it's July and geese would not be migrating then in the skies of Oregon. Annoyed at being made fun of, the visitors leave. "I forget sometimes what laughter can do," the Chief says; it's McMurphy who has enabled him to remember.

Nurse Ratched arrives and the aide bested by McMurphy over the toothpaste is so anxious to tattle he forgets the truly important news--that Mr. Blastic has died. In this hospital, violations of the rules cause more concern than the deaths of the patients.

McMurphy has resumed singing, angering the Nurse. Again the Chief sees her rage as a physical force that transforms her from a human being into a machine--this time a huge diesel truck with a radiator grill smile, rolling full speed towards McMurphy. But McMurphy stops her by walking casually from the latrine wearing only a towel.

He explains that someone has taken his work farm clothing (using a criminal's word--boosted for stolen--language that the Nurse doesn't understand). When Nurse Ratched realizes that this reasonable explanation of his nakedness has made her seem silly she takes out her anger (now compared to a blizzard) on the aides. Then McMurphy drops his towel, revealing that he was not naked but had been wearing his gaudy undershorts.

It's a complete defeat for Nurse Ratched: only as other patients straggle out of their beds does she regain her self-control. Even then the anger hasn't disappeared; we can still see it in her greetings to the patients, pleasant-sounding on the surface, but barbed and cutting underneath. She warns Fredrickson and Sefelt about switching their medication, tells Billy not to disappoint his mother, asks Harding about the chewed fingernails on his embarrassing hands. No weakness escapes her. She'd like to use the same tactics on McMurphy, but he's still singing.

Chief Bromden continues to sweep after everyone has left. At the end of the scene, as he sweeps under the patients' beds, we see the contrast between the world of the hospital and McMurphy's world--or, actually, we smell the contrast. The hospital's smells are musty, depressing; McMurphy's bed has "the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work," the true smells of a life not controlled by the Combine.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 9

Our second morning in the ward is much different from our first. McMurphy is doing everything he can to liven things up, inventing stories about Billy Bibbit's sexual adventures (again, sex is as necessary as laughter to a healthy life), and acting as if there was no place on earth he'd rather be than this hospital with its fine beds and good food. He refuses to take the rules seriously: even the clock, which with Nurse Ratched's assistance rules the ward, becomes a butter-smeared victim of McMurphy's pranks.

But the Big Nurse is still in control. When McMurphy asks her to dampen the piped-in music, or let patients use a quieter room for their card games, she dismisses his requests as impossible and selfish. Her answers make a certain sense--almost all of Nurse Ratched's rules do. She is never on the surface, an irrational woman. But because she demands obedience at the expense of charity and generosity, she becomes irrational, a monster. The tension between the Nurse and the new patient is growing. "Everyone on the ward can feel it's started."

McMurphy leaves to be interviewed by Doctor Spivey. At the group meeting we learn that he's cleverly used the interview to maneuver his way around Nurse Ratched. Before the nurse even has a chance to begin the "pecking party," (note how she claims they were making "quite a bit of headway with Mr. Harding's problem" the day before, when of course just the opposite was true), McMurphy takes over. He's convinced the doctor that the ward should hold a carnival. Taber, the other trouble maker, once made the same request, and nothing came of it. As soon as the Nurse trains her eyes on the doctor, we see the project is doomed this time, too.

But McMurphy isn't finished. He has also figured out a way to obtain his card room by cleverly using the Nurse's own arguments against her. Since the music must be turned up loud enough for the patients to hear it, why not turn it up still louder? Then why not open another room to give other patients a quiet place to read?

This time the doctor can't be pressured to oppose McMurphy's plan. The Nurse is so angry at McMurphy's victory she can't read her notes for the group meeting. McMurphy prevents the pecking party from starting by monopolizing the discussion. Dream analysis is a frequently used technique in therapy, but he makes it seem absurd by inventing a dream about his father and using the dream as an excuse to tell tall tales about his past life.

Despite this victory, Chief Bromden looks on and grows discouraged again. Nurse Ratched still covers "one whole side of the room like a Jap statue" (presumably an enormous Buddha). "She lost a little battle here today, but it's a minor battle in a big war that she's been winning and that she'll go on winning." Why? Because she is with the Combine, and the Combine can afford to lose a few battles; It never gives up, and eventually its opponents always surrender. These thoughts are so depressing that the Chief escapes them by hiding in his fog, the fog that gives him safety at the expense of sanity.