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

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

Part II of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest consists of eight scenes.

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

We're still in the day room, with the patients seated around the switched-off television, just as they were at the end of Part 1. Why did Kesey choose to split things up this way--stick this intermission in the middle of what might easily be a single scene? Because we're in another world. On the surface nothing has changed; underneath everything has. The patients have asserted themselves; Nurse Ratched has lost control. Now she's the one being watched--and not just by the patients, but by her staff, who for the first time see that she, too, is vulnerable.

Still, this scene shows that the change is not as complete as it first seems. McMurphy has scored an encouraging victory, but we've already seen that the Nurse and the Combine can afford a few losses.

Indeed, the Chief fears that his situation is more dangerous since McMurphy pulled him out of the fog. His immediate worry: Nurse Ratched and the staff will guess that he is not deaf and dumb. One of the aides seems to suspect the truth and tries to trick the chief into revealing it for certain, though without success.

Even before the incident with the television, Nurse Ratched had scheduled a meeting of the hospital staff to discuss McMurphy. The Chief's descriptions of past meetings make them sound brutal; his hallucinations transform the bitterness displayed by the staff members into poison and acid, and the discussions of the patients are so lengthy the men being discussed appear to materialize on the coffee table, naked and "vulnerable to any fiendish notion" the staff took.

As Nurse Ratched enters, the Chief worries that, like the aide, she suspects his secret and will want to investigate further. He's so nervous he's ready to confess but is saved when the Nurse herself becomes rattled by the stares of the staff members who have learned of her defeat.

The meeting begins. Originally Nurse Ratched called it to arrange McMurphy's move into the Disturbed Ward; Dr. Spivey believes this is still her goal, and he agrees that given McMurphy's recent behavior, she may be correct. He asks the young residents (physicians past their internships but still in training) for their opinion.

Ironically, the doctors, though educated and intelligent, show no more courage than do their patients. They, too, are afraid, and fear makes them act like sheep, each agreeing unthinkingly with the other, each trying to outdo the other in the use of impressive-sounding but meaningless psychological terms. When one resident dares to suggest the truth--that McMurphy isn't mentally ill--the rest attack him: it's another pecking party. Finally all agree that he is a negative oedipal (a diagnosis chosen seemingly at random) and that he should be moved to the Disturbed Ward.

This, however, is no longer what Nurse Ratched wants. She wants revenge, though of course her explanation makes it appear that she is only acting for the good of the other patients. If she permits McMurphy to be moved to the Disturbed Ward, he will appear a martyr who has sacrificed himself for the other patients. If, on the other hand, Nurse Ratched can keep him in her ward, she'll be able to prove that he is just a selfish, fearful, ordinary man. She'll have ample opportunity to break him, she reminds everyone: McMurphy has been committed to the hospital, and she and the other staff members are the ones who decide when he will be released.

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

McMurphy, unaware that Nurse Ratched has planned a counterattack, acts more outrageously than ever. Made to clean the latrine, he writes obscenities in reversed letters to shock the Nurse when she checks his job with a mirror. And he is not the only one being difficult. The other patients have slacked off on their chores, preferring to listen to McMurphy's stories. So strong is the new patient's personality that even the Chief, who heard the Nurse's plotting, hopes that McMurphy can defeat her and the Combine.

How did McMurphy become so strong? This is the question the Chief asks himself as he looks in the mirror. He has spent much of his life trying to be on the inside the same man he looks to be on the outside world: strong, hard, and mean. He'll never succeeded. Maybe, the Chief thinks, McMurphy has survived because "he hadn't let what he looked like run his life one way or the other." The Chief may feel weaker than his face appears, and Harding may be ashamed of his feminine hands, but McMurphy is secure enough that he doesn't always have to act like the roughneck he appears to be. He can paint; he can write letters in lovely script.

You'll notice how clearly the Chief is thinking here. Even though it is the other Acute patients who seem to be most obviously changed by McMurphy's arrival, the changes that McMurphy brought about in the Chief are more profound. The fog machine has been shut down. The hallucinations will still disturb him, but much less frequently; in general, for the rest of the book, the Chief's descriptions of events will match what we would see if we were with him. When he wakes up at night, he sees not machine and scalp-hunting aides, but the real world outside his window.

The view surprises him. The smell of autumn recalls time's passage, his Indian boyhood. Far below he spots a young dog happily sniffing around the hospital grounds for squirrel holes. (Compare this dog to the one the Chief described in Scene I, Part 1, afraid and lost in the fog; it's another sign of the Chief's healing.) The dog freezes as a flock of Canadian geese fly in V formation across the sky.

NOTE: IMAGES OF FREEDOM Unlike McMurphy's whale-dotted shorts, the symbols here are not jokes. The dog and the geese in flight are images of freedom--the freedom of the Chief's Indian past, the freedom McMurphy has brought into the ward as Bull Goose Looney. What will happen to this freedom? The answer is unclear, but not encouraging. For the geese fly away, and as the dog chases after them, his chase leads him towards a highway and into the path of an oncoming car--another of the machines the Combine uses to subdue the wilderness. The Chief is taken away before he learns the dog's fate.

The Chief looks at the nurse who led him to bed. In what is not a hallucination but simply an act of imagination, he sees her at home trying to scrub her wine-colored birthmark away. You may remember that McMurphy, too, has a "wine-colored scar"--we saw it in Part I, Scene 3--but his is healing. The nurse's mark can't be healed because it rises from the illness inside her, both the cause and a symptom of her hatred. Against so much hatred, the Chief feels himself weakening. He wants McMurphy's help, but McMurphy is not awake to offer it.

^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: SCENE 3

We're back at the group meeting, but what a difference between this one and those that have come before it! Now McMurphy isn't alone in squabbling with Nurse Ratched; other patients--especially Cheswick, who no longer backs down now that he sees an ally beside him--do so too.

The one question McMurphy has is why the Big Nurse has given up so easily. On a trip to the swimming pool he learns the truth. She hasn't given up; she's merely biding her time. While the Chief nervously stays at McMurphy's side (Chief Bromden's fear of water is another sign of his decline since his Indian youth), McMurphy talks to the pool lifeguard, an ex-football player now in the Disturbed ward. When McMurphy says he likes the hospital more than the work farm he was at previously, the lifeguard disagrees. At least at the work farm you know you'll be released at the end of your sentence. Patients committed to the hospital don't have a set sentence: they can be held for as long as the hospital wants to hold them.

The Chief remembers what the Nurse said at the staff meeting and is afraid, and we can see McMurphy becoming afraid, too. As the patients leave the pool, a group from another ward arrives; one of them, severely handicapped, falls on the wet floor. Harding and Cheswick go to help him, and they ask for McMurphy's assistance. McMurphy refuses. He won't help anyone for fear that it might endanger his chances of being released.

The next day we see further evidence of his new attitude. He obediently cleans the latrine. When Cheswick attacks the Nurse at Group Meeting, McMurphy declines to back him up, so upsetting Cheswick that he is marched off to the Disturbed Ward. The Nurse is regaining her power. For the first time in days the Chief suffers a hallucination--again he sees the Combine's machinery of control and says "It beams all the way into my stomach."

At first the Acutes believe McMurphy's obedience is a new tactic he's using against Nurse Ratched. The Chief knows better. McMurphy is finally getting cagey, just as the Chief's father finally realized it would be smarter to allow the government to buy his tribal village. (The government will build a hydroelectric dam that will destroy the waterfall the Chief has already described; because the Indians spear salmon as they leap up the falls, the dam will effectively destroy the tribe's livelihood.) Like hiding in the fog, giving in is the safest, smartest thing to do.

Eventually the Acutes see the truth about McMurphy. He is no more courageous than they are; Nurse Ratched was right. The other patients seem to be resigned to this truth, even Cheswick. But McMurphy has inspired hope, and when he takes that hope away he leaves the patients worse off than before. Cheswick, who had waited so long for an ally, can't endure life when that ally surrenders to the enemy. At the next trip to the swimming pool, he drowns himself.