ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST SUMMARY

"Chief" Bromden, a schizophrenic Native American man who pretends to

bedeaf and dumb so that everybody will ignore him, narrates One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The novel begins the morning that a new
"Admission," Randle McMurphy, is introduced to an insane asylum where
Chief is the longest-residing patient. McMurphy is larger than life,
intelligent, and observant. He stirs up the ward immediately by
introducing friendly competition—gambling—and encouraging the men
to rebel against the petty rules created and enforced by Nurse Ratched
(often referred to as "Big Nurse").
McMurphy places a bet with the other men on the ward that he can
break Nurse Ratched without a) getting sent to the Disturbed Ward, b)
getting treated with electroshock therapy, or c) being lobotomized.
Slowly, McMurphy undermines Nurse Ratched’s system of control while
remaining Mr. Nice Guy. She’s no fool, however. What McMurphy doesn’t
understand is that Nurse Ratched has a lot of control over the situation.
Since he’s a patient in the asylum, she can keep him locked up as long
as she wants. As long as he’s under her rule, she has the power to send
him for electroshock therapy or a lobotomy. The question is simply
whether she’ll utilize her power against him or not. When McMurphy
figures this out, he steps back and begins to behave—but not for long.
Just when Nurse Ratched thinks she has the upper hand, McMurphy
steps back up to the plate and challenges her authority again. This time,
though, he goes too far. He sneaks two prostitutes into the ward, gets
everybody drunk, and also breaks into the prescription drug cabinet.
After the incident, Nurse Ratched guilt-trips all the men back into her
control. Speaking of going too far, Nurse Ratched goes way, way too
far.She threatens one of the patients, Billy Bibbit, by saying she’ll tell his
mother about his visit with a "cheap" woman. Bibbit panics, which
demoralizes the other inmates. Bibbit suddenly commits suicide after
reflecting on the shame that Big Nurse is about to bring down on his
head.
Of course, Nurse Ratched blames McMurphy for Bibbit’s death, which
McMurphy doesn’t take so well. In fact, he’s so angry that he shatters
the glass over the nurse’s station for a second time. Then, in one of the
biggest scenes in the novel, McMurphy tears Nurse Ratched's shirt off
and reveals her breasts. Why’s this move so important? Well, McMurphy
has proved that the Big Nurse is "only" a woman: in the 1960s women
were considered the "weaker sex" by men, and therefore less powerful
than men on the ward. McMurphy also mangles Nurse Ratched
physically, choking her badly.
The momentum of the crazy situation allows Nurse Ratched to send
McMurphy upstairs for a lobotomy. When McMurphy returns to the
ward,he’s a vegetable. Chief realizes he can’t let McMurphy suffer for
years in the prison of his body. That night, he smothers McMurphy to
death. Chief then escapes from the hospital after breaking a window. His
getaway is only possible because of McMurphy, who previously had
taught Chief how to lift a heavy panel in the tub-room and break the
windows. Chief reaches the highway, where he catches a ride with a
Mexican guy and heads to Canada and freedom.

PART I, CHAPTER 1

 Chief, our narrator, describes how the black orderlies hate everything
and are hateful. He tries to avoid them but they like to make fun of
him.
 The orderlies think he’s deaf and dumb (as in, he can’t speak), but he
actually understands everything they say. Chief’s been fooling
 everyone in the asylum for a long time, allowing them to think that he
can’t speak or hear.
 He’s mopping the ward floor when "Big Nurse" (Nurse Ratched) opens
the door and comes inside. He describes her as having the kind of
personality that you can’t decide if it’s hot or cold; either way it
burns.
 He tries to hide his eyes as she passes. According to Chief’s narrative,
"they" can’t tell that much about you if they can’t see your eyes.
 Big Nurse sees the orderlies who are still mumbling at the end of the
hall. They sense her glare and break apart, looking confused.
 She’s instantly furious because she knows what the orderlies are
saying (though Chief doesn't clue us in on the details of the
conversation). Their mutual hatred is palpable, something you can
practically see and touch.
 But before the orderlies and Nurse Ratched actually start fighting
each other, the patients come out of their dorms. Nurse Ratched
stops bickering.
 She urges the orderlies to move along. Then she nods at the patients,
once to each—a calculated nod. Chief says she’s bitter that she’s not
perfect; God made a mistake when he gave her such big breasts.
 Nurse Ratched tells the orderlies that they should shave "poor Mr.
Bromden first" (that’s Chief) and to try to avoid the disturbance he
causes.
 Chief ducks back into the mop closet to hide. He says breakfast
makes you stronger and more awake so you can avoid the orderlies
slipping one of their machines on you instead of an electric shaver.
But, they try to use the machine on you before breakfast.
 Although Chief is hiding, he knows the orderly can smell him and his
fear.
 Chief remembers the time when he went bird-hunting with his father,
hoping the memory will help him forget his current fear. He recalls
how the bird was safe as long as he kept still, but if it moved because
of his fear, Papa would be able to shoot it.
 The orderlies catch Chief before he gets ten feet out of the mop
closet and drag him back to the shaving room.
 When the shaver gets to his temples, that’s when he knows it’s not a
shaver but the other thing—a machine—and then he can’t hold the
noise back.
 He starts yelling. He hollers until Big Nurse gets there. She jams her
wicker handbag into his mouth and shoves it down with a mop
handle. (Yeah, Chief is hallucinating.)
 Chief thinks back to hunting again and remembers a lost hound
jumping around in the fog, afraid because it can’t see anything or
smell anything but its own fear.
 Chief seems to think that telling his story—the truth about the
asylum, Nurse Ratched, and McMurphy—will feel like being that lost
hunting dog.
 Chief says he’s been silent so long that his story will now rage out of
him.
 He assures the reader that what he’s about to reveal is the truth, he
says, even if it didn't happen.

PART I, CHAPTER 2

 Chief starts the new chapter by saying, "When the fog cleared,"
meaning when he becomes conscious again after the "shaving"
incident.
 Anyway, Chief is now in the "day room." He doesn’t remember a
thing that happened because they manage to get "those things
they call pills" down him. He just knows that this time, they didn’t
take him to the Shock Room or the Seclusion Room because here
he is in the day room instead.
 Every morning after breakfast, the ward door starts opening. It
opens and closes a thousand times a day.
 All of the patients sit in a line, putzing around with jigsaw
puzzlesand waiting to see who comes through the door.
 There’s nothing else to do.
 Sometimes, it’s a resident (young doctor in residency) who has
come to see what they’re like Before Medication—called BM.
Sometimes it’s a wife of a patient.
 This morning, it’s an Admission (meaning a new guy). Everybody
stops what they’re doing to watch.
 Chief is buckled down to the chair and can’t get up. Most days, he
sees a new Admission and sees how the orderlies mess with him.
 But even though Chief can’t see this new Admission yet, he can
tell the new guy isn’t ordinary. This Admission isn’t scared and isn’t
submissive.
 He sounds big. He sounds brave. He finally comes over and says,
"Good mornin’, buddies."
 He doesn’t look like Chief’s dad—a full-blood Columbia Indian—but
he sounds like him, with a voice that’s loud and full of hell.
 The new Admission stands there looking at them and laughs.
Everybody stares.
 Then he introduces himself as McMurphy— a gambling fool.
 McMurphy starts messing with Cheswick, an inmate playing cards,
while one of the orderlies circles him with a thermometer.
 McMurphy starts shaking hands and explaining how he’s ended up
at the asylum—a hassle or two at the work farm and the courts
decided he’s a psychopath. And he’s not going to argue with the
court if it means no more farm work.
 McMurphy says the court told him that "a psychopath’s a guy
fights too much and fucks too much, but they ain’t wholly right, do
you think? I mean, whoever heard tell of a man gettin’ too much
poozle?" That’s a good introduction to McMurphy and an
interesting new word for sex.

PART I, CHAPTER 3

 While McMurphy looks around at the day room, Chief describes

how the room is ordered, socially-speaking.
 The Acutes move around a lot and tell jokes and spy on each other.
 The Chronics aren’t there to get fixed, but simply to keep them off
the streets. Chief acknowledges that he’s a Chronic.
 The Chronics are further divided into the Walkers and the
Vegetables. Chief’s a Walker.
 Some people who are now Chronics used to be Acutes but they got
mangled in the Shock Shop—electroshocked so badly that their
brains are now fried. Ellis is one of those.
 Ruckly was also an Acute who became a Chronic after they
mangled him another way. Chief describes what happened to
Ruckly, so we can figure out that the guy was lobotomized. A
lobotomy is a surgical operation on the frontal lobe of the brain
that was used back then to treat mental illness.
 Colonel Matterson is the oldest Chronic. He’s a terrified cavalry
soldier from the First War.
 Chief has been in the ward the longest, though, ever since the
Second World War. Big Nurse has been working at the asylum even
longer than Chief has been there.
 The Chronics and the Acutes don’t mingle. The Acutes claim it’s
because of the Chronics’ stench, but the real reason is they’re
scared they’ll end up that way too.
 McMurphy figures out right away that he’s an Acute. He heads
over there to greet everybody but he makes them nervous with his
laughter. Finally, he realizes he’s making them upset and he starts
telling them they don’t seem crazy to him.
 He asks Billy Bibbit who is the "bull goose loony" here. In other
words, he wants to know who’s top dog.
 Billy stutters that he himself isn’t, but he’s in line for the spot.
 McMurphy says that’s cool and all, but he thinks he’ll take over
that job, thank you very much.
 So McMurphy asks Billy to take him to their leader so they can
figure out who's going to be boss around here.
 Billy turns to Harding and says he guesses that Harding would be
the man McMurphy is seeking.
 Harding is president of the Patient’s Council and he always brags
about his sexy wife.
 Harding looks at the ceiling and asks if this "gentleman" has an
appointment.
 Billy asks McMurphy if he has an appointment.
 McMurphy tells Billy that the hospital isn’t big enough for both
him and Harding. Besides, he’s used to being top dog wherever he
goes. So either Harding meets him "man to man" or he’s yellow
and should leave town by sunset.
 Harding tells Billy that this "young upstart" (meaning McMurphy)
should know that he will meet him in the main hall at high noon
and they’ll settle it once and for all.
 McMurphy tells Billy that he should warn Harding that he’s so crazy
that he even voted for Eisenhower.
 Well, Harding tells Billy to tell McMurphy that he’s so crazy he
voted for Eisenhower twice.
 To one-up Harding, McMurphy instructs Billy to tell Harding that
he’s so crazy he expects to vote for Eisenhower again this
November.
 Harding says, " I take off my hat."
 Everybody knows McMurphy has won.
 The Acutes wander over to learn about McMurphy. He tells them
how he’s been in and out of jail here, there, and everywhere. Then
he goes over to meet the Chronics.
 None of the Chronics understand what he’s up to, but McMurphy
keeps insisting that it’s important he meet everybody and know
the men he’ll be dealing with.
 When he reaches Chief—strapped in his chair in the corner—
McMurphy leans back to laugh. Suddenly, Chief is scared that the
reason McMurphy’s laughing is because he realizes Chief’s deaf-
and-mute act is just that—an act.
 McMurphy asks what’s his story and Billy Bibbit calls across the
room and answers for Chief that his name is Chief Bromden but
everybody calls him Chief Broom because the orderlies always
make him sweep.
 The patients start discussing Chief. Harding says he’s a Columbia
Indian and that his father was the tribal leader. Also, he’s deaf.
 McMurphy leans down to ask, "Is that right? Are you deaf?"
 Billy tells the new leader that Chief’s deaf and dumb.
 Well, he can still shake my hand, can’t he? McMurphy says, holding
out his hand. Chief shakes his hand.
 Then Nurse Ratched comes in and calls "Mr. McMurry" over. She
says that she understands he’s being difficult about taking his
shower, but everyone is required to follow the rules.
 McMurphy and the Big Nurse look each other over and size each
other up.
 McMurphy points out that the only time that people remind him to
follow the rules is when they expect him to break them.
 Then he lets go of Chief’s hand.
 PART I, CHAPTER 4

 Nurse Flinn asks Nurse Ratched what she thinks of McMurphy. Big
Nurse responds that in her opinion the new patient is a
manipulator and plans to "take over."
 But why would he want to do that? Nurse Flinn wants to know.
 Big Nurse responds, "You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an
institution for the insane."
 Big Nurse likes everything run perfectly, and she likes to keep
absolute control. But since she spends time on the Outside, she
likes to control that, too.
 Chief thinks of Nurse Ratched as a part of the "Combine," which to
him is a sort of group of controlling people who not only try to
manipulate the ward (the Inside), but the outside world as well.
 The Big Nurse wants such perfect control that she hopes every
patient becomes a wheelchair Chronic. She even she creates a
perfectly subservient staff—doctors, nurses, etc.—to fit what she
wants. If a doctor won’t conform to her wishes, she makes him so
miserable that he begs for a transfer out of her ward.
 As far as orderlies go, Nurse Ratched has gotten rid of tons of
orderlies who didn’t conform to what she wanted. If they don’t
hate enough—if they don’t hate her enough—then she lets them
go. The ones she keeps are all black. Chief usually refers to them
as "the black boys”.
 The first orderly she decided to keep had seen his mother raped
while his father stood by, tied to the hot iron stove. The other two
orderlies, also black, came two years later. They are very dark-
skinned. According to Big Nurse, the darker their skin, the more
likely they are to keep the ward spotlessly clean.
 The orderlies are in such sync with Big Nurse that she doesn’t
even have to communicate what she wants. They are "in contact
on a high-voltage wave length of hate."
 At 6:45, the shavers buzz and the Acutes line up to get shaved.
Next, the walking Chronics go through; the Wheelers go in last.
 At 7:00, the mess hall opens and they enter in reverse order.
 At 7:30, they’re back to the day room.
 Big Nurse pushes a button to get everything started. Everybody
waits.
 At 7:45, the orderlies move down the line of Chronics to tape
catheters on those who need them.
 At 8:00, the Big Nurse announces "Medications." The Acutes first,
then the Chronics, then the Wheelers get their medicines. The
Vegetables get theirs last.
 If somebody asks what they’re being required to swallow, they’re
dealt a punishment. This time, it’s Taber who asks. He’s forced to
spend the morning mopping latrines.
 Chief once managed to keep one under his tongue, then crushed it
to see what was inside. He saw it contained microscopic wires and
grids, like the ones he helped the Radar Corps work with in the
Army. (Sounds like more hallucinations here.)
 At 8:20, the cards and puzzles come out.
 At 8:30, the ward door opens and two technicians come in,
smelling like wine.
 Two of the orderlies catch Taber in the latrine and take him to the
mattress room. They push him face down onto the mattress. The
nurse comes in with a long needle and they close the door. She
comes back out, wiping the needle on part of Taber’s pants. The
orderlies are in room with Taber for a long time and then they
come out, carrying the patient across the hall. He’s wrapped in a
damp sheet.
 At 9:00, residents (young doctors) come in to talk to the Acutes
about what they did when they were little boys.
 At 9:50, the residents leave.
 Taber is wheeled out on a gurney.
 They take him over to the Shock Room.
 At 10:00, the mail comes.
 At 10:30, Public Relation, the hospital employee responsible for
public relations, comes in with a ladies’ club following. He brings
women on tours through the ward and then they have coffee with
 the nurses. Sometimes, he stays outside in the day room and
laughs and laughs, but Chief doesn’t know what’s so funny.
 At 10:40, 10:50, 11:00, etc., patients shuffle in and out for
appointments.
 Chief describes the ward as humming the way a cotton mill hums.
 Chief enters memory lane and he tells us about his high school
days as a member of the football team.
 The entire team goes to visit a cotton mill. Chief stays inside the
building, out of the way of the black girls who are running around
and working the machines. Chief is wearing his championship
jacket and the girls begin to stare at him.
 One of the girls approaches Chief and chats about football for a
while. She’s obviously flirting. Chief comments on how all of the
cotton fluff floating around makes it seem like he’s seeing her
through a fog on a duck-hunting trip.
 The girl flirtatiously asks what he’d want with her, out alone in the
woods in a duck blind. He answers that she could take care of his
gun. All the girls are giggling by this point.
 She takes ahold of his wrists and says, "Do, take me out of here,
out of the mill, out of this life. Take me to a duck blind sometime,
huh, Big Boy?" And Chief is totally confused, standing there
looking at her, with his mouth open.
 The memory ends.
 The ward is like a factory—a factory for the "Combine" that deals
with mistakes made out in society. And Big Nurse is happy about it.
 She mentions how Taber is so much better since he got back from
the hospital.
 But an Admission is different. An Admission will always need to be
worked on to make him fit into the routine. A new Admit might foul
everything up. Chief reminds us that Big Nurse gets really peeved
if anything keeps her operation from running smoothly. This is
what we call blatant foreshadowing.
 PART I, CHAPTER 5

 Chief loses himself in the fog but the fog clears just before one
p.m. when the orderlies come in to tell the Acutes to clear the floor
for a meeting.

 Big Nurse watches everything through her window. She hasn’t

moved from that spot for three hours.
 A doctor comes in and sits in his chair to the left of the door. The
patients sit down and then the nurses and residents come in.
That’s when Big Nurse gets up and comes out with the log book
and a pile of notes. She sits to the right of the door.
 Old Pete Bancini starts moaning about how tired he is.
 Big Nurse asks somebody to sit next to old Pete and keep him
quiet so the meeting can start.
 Billy Bibbit sits next to him.
 Nurse Ratched says, "Shall we get into the meeting?" and looks
around, smiling, to see if anybody is going to interrupt her. Nobody
will meet her gaze except McMurphy.
 She waits a minute, then says that when Friday’s meeting closed,
they had been discussing Harding’s problem with his wife.
Apparently, Harding’s wife has such large breasts that it makes
him uneasy when other men stare at her. He may have even
beaten his wife a few times because her bosom makes him feel
inferior.
 Nurse Ratched asks if anyone wants to touch upon this subject?
 McMurphy wonders aloud if she means touch upon the wife.
 The Big Nurse is almost startled. Then she pulls out some
information on McMurphy and begins to read—he’s 35, never
married, gets into lots of fights, has problems with gambling,
arrested for rape, etc.
 The doctor gets interested when she says "rape" and Big Nurse
clarifies that it was statutory rape (meaning, it wasn’t violent, but
the girl was underage).
 McMurphy explains that the girl wouldn’t testify so the charges
had to be dropped. And furthermore, she was so willing that he
had to sew his pants shut to get her off him and leave town to
escape the girl.
 They start to analyze McMurphy. The doctor calls him
McMurrybecause of Big Nurse’s mispronunciation of his name, and
McMurphy corrects him. It’s clear in this exchange that Big Nurse
has deliberately called him the wrong name in an attempt to get to
him. Her tactic doesn’t actually work.
 This is McMurphy’s first time in a mental institution, though he’s
been in and out of prison many times.
 He gets up to show the doctor part of his record—the part Big
Nurse left out, which is that he’s overzealous in sexual relations.
He asks the doctor if that is "real serious."
 The doctor claims he’s more interested in the report that
McMurphy is possibly faking mental illness to escape work at the
work farm.
 McMurphy stands up and challenges the doctor by saying, "do I
look like a sane man?"
 Big Nurse finally realizes that McMurphy is out of control and she
asks the doctor to explain the "protocol" for these meetings.
 So the doctor lets McMurphy know that patients are supposed to
remain seated during meetings.
 As the meeting proceeds, Chief notices that McMurphy is
beginning to look confused. The new Admission doesn’t
understand why the patients won’t cut loose and have a good
time. He’s beginning to notice how carefully controlled everything
and everybody is.
 The theory of the Therapeutic Community is that a guy has to
learn to get along in a group before he can get along in society. In
this group, you are supposed to talk, confess, and confront. The
key is to never let a problem fester. Usually, the meetings end with
old Pete standing up and saying, "I’m tired!"
 Here Chief begins a story within a story.
 Keep in mind that this all happened a few years ago: Big Nurse
opens the meeting right up by asking people to let out their
secrets. All of the patients are stunned and sit in silence for twenty
minutes.
 Finally, Nurse Ratched asks if anybody has ever done anything
they’ve kept secret. People open up and start confessing their
worst sins—like raping their sister or robbing a gas station or
killing a cat.
 Then old Pete stands up and said, "I’m tired!" Everybody hushes
and the Big Nurse is furious.
 (Some backstory: Old Pete is a Chronic. He’d always been
chronically ill due to a botched birth when the doctor used ice
tongs instead of forceps. The tongs were too hard and actually
squeezed Pete’s skull together.)
 Big Nurse tries to get one of the orderlies shut Pete up. Pete,
however, attacks the orderly with a big rusty iron ball on the end
of a chain. The other orderlies try to calm him but they’re afraid.
 Finally, Pete begins to talk about how he was born dead and he’s
tired of talking and standing up.
 That’s when Big Nurse manages to knock him out with some
medicine in a needle. She’s swift and fast, that one.
 Poor Pete had actually tried to tell everybody something, but he
just got punished for it. He never tried anything like that again.
 The story ends. We’re back in the present.
 At 2 p.m., the group is still analyzing Harding.
 The doctor begins to get impatient. He’d rather be in his office
with real patients.
 The Acutes snap out of it and feel ashamed, realizing that they’ve
been tricked into grilling one of their own friends again. They get
up and leave.
 McMurphy sits where he is, still watching and trying to figure out
what’s happening. Then he goes over and sits in front of Harding,
who doesn’t notice him. They seem to ignore each other.
 McMurphy puts a cigarette in his mouth and begins to talk. He
asks Harding if this is the way these meetings usually go, like a
bunch of chickens at a pecking party. In other words, the flock gets
the sight of blood and starts pecking someone to death and it
might not end until the entire flock is dead.
 McMurphy also notes that the person who delivers the first peck
that draws blood is definitely Nurse Ratched.
 McMurphy tells Harding that he must have done something to
create enemies, because during the meeting the whole ward
seemed out to get him.
 Harding denies that the group is against him, instead insisting that
the session was done for his own benefit. According to Harding,
McMurphy must be a stupid brute not to have understood what
was really happening during the meeting.
 McMurphy doesn’t take the bait. He just asks if Harding is really
convinced that all of this was done for his own good.
 Harding says he doesn’t believe that Nurse Ratched is pecking at
his eyes. McMurphy assures Harding that the Big Nurse isn’t
pecking at his eyes— she’s pecking at his balls.
 Harding flinches.
 But as McMurphy continues, Harding persists in denying it, saying
delusional stuff like, "Our dear Miss Ratched? Our sweet, smiling,
tender angel of mercy, Mother Ratched, a ball-cutter? Why, friend,
that’s most unlikely."
 They continue to argue until Harding realizes everybody’s staring
at him. He begins to wail. Then he begins to whisper, "Oh, the
bitch, the bitch, the bitch."
 The two men agree that Dr. Spivey is exactly like them—helpless in
Nurse Ratched’s hands. He can’t fire her because her friend is the
one who does the hiring and firing.
 Harding explains that she keeps the doctor in line by insinuating
that he’s addicted to opiates.
 Harding tells McMurphy that the patients and ward staff are all
rabbits and Nurse Ratched is the wolf—the world is divided into the
weak and the strong. He even says that McMurphy is a rabbit too.
 McMurphy doesn’t like being called a rabbit or dividing the world in
such a black-and-white way. He wonders if it’s all the "whambam"
(a.k.a. sex) that makes him a rabbit.
 Well, Harding says that all of the banging only makes McMurphy a
better-functioning rabbit than the rest of the patients, who have
been emasculated by Nurse Ratched.
 Then Harding leans forward and tells McMurphy that he may, in
fact, be a wolf.
 McMurphy doesn’t like that any better than being called a rabbit.
He’s insistent that nobody is a rabbit or a wolf. Nobody. He tries to
encourage the patients not to answer Nurse Ratched’s questions,
play into her manipulative games, or turn on each other.
 The guys try to explain to McMurphy what happens if you resist
her. You’re either a) shipped upstairs to the Disturbed Ward, b) go
to the Shock Shop, or c) get an operation (that is, a lobotomy).
 McMurphy persists in trying to organize collective resistance, and
Harding continually attempts to show how futile resistance is
because Nurse Ratched’s power is so extensive.
 Harding claims that the only way to control a woman is through
your penis. The only weapon they have against power like hers is
sex. But, is that even possible with Nurse Ratched? Could you even
get it up for her?
 No, McMurphy admits, he wouldn’t be able to get it up for her.
Apparently, she’s none too inspiring.
 McMurphy tries to figure out how to get under her skin without
getting sent to the electroshock therapy or for an operation or to
the Disturbed Ward. If he’s nice, she can’t do anything about it,
right?
 According to Harding, as long as you keep control and don’t lose
your temper, you’re safe.
 So McMurphy makes a bet with the men that he can get under
Nurse Ratched’s skin. He says he’s not crazy and he’s smart, two
qualities that she won’t be expecting. So they line up and bet him.
PART I, CHAPTER 6
 One Christmas at midnight, somebody who perfectly fits the
description of Santa Claus comes stumbling into the ward. The
orderlies corner him. They keep him in the ward for six years
before they discharge him. (Um, our narrator seems a bit
delusional.)
 Big Nurse controls the speed of time—she’ll slow it down or speed
it up to keep things under her control.
 She usually makes time move at a slow crawl, to make everybody
go crazy.
 Sometimes, instead of fog, she lets a chemical gas in through the
vents. The whole ward turns solid and still when she changes the
gas to plastic. On those days, Chief struggles to get free from the
plastic so he can go to the bathroom, but he can’t get up out of
the chair. Finally, he pees his pants. (Warning: with passages like
these, we recommend that you use them to understand the truth
of his feelings, not the truth of the events he describes.)
 Fog usually makes you lose track of time. Since McMurphy arrived,
though, the fog hasn’t been around.
 McMurphy chats as he plays cards with the others. The music
coming in through the speakers in the ceiling starts to drive him
nuts. The music is basically always on, but most of the other
patients have learned to tune it out.
 McMurphy decides to get the music turned off, no matter what it
takes. Harding, however, warns McMurphy that getting the music
turned off will make Nurse Ratched angry—a good way to quickly
lose his bet about getting under the Big Nurse’s skin without
punishment.
 Chief watches McMurphy, who is playing cards with the other guys,
try to get them to loosen up and experience freedom through
gambling. The patients are really scared, so McMurphy starts to let
them win.
 Everybody knows McMurphy is letting them win, but they’re all
happy to get back the cigarettes they originally lost to him. They
have smirks on their faces like they’re the biggest, baddest
gamblers around.
 The orderlies round everybody up for bed. Nurse Ratched warns
Nurse Pilbow that McMurphy is a "sex maniac," which makes Nurse
Pilbow so nervous that she can’t even dispense medicine right.
 McMurphy sees her fear so he gives Nurse Pilbow a big friendly
grin. His look makes her so nervous that she drops a water pitcher.
 McMurphy says, "Let me help," and sticks his hand inside the
nurse station door. She gets even more frazzled and holds up a
cross,like that will frighten him away. But all McMurphy does is pick
up the pitcher she dropped and hand it to her.
 McMurphy asks Chief if he wants his pill, but Chief shakes his head
"no."
 McMurphy starts getting dressed for bed and Chief looks at the
new man’s shorts—they’re black with big white whales and red
eyes. McMurphy explains that a woman gave him the shorts
because she said he was a "symbol." Then he gets into bed—he’s
in the bed next to Chief—and tells Chief that he better get to bed
because the orderlies are coming.
 Chief looks around and gets into bed just before the orderly comes
over to tie a sheet over Chief.
 In the dark, McMurphy starts to giggle. He says, "Why, you sure
did give a jump when I told you that coon was coming, Chief. I
thought somebody told me you was deaf."

PART I, CHAPTER 7

 Warning: in this chapter, be prepared for intense weirdness.

 This is the first night in a long time that Chief has gone to bed
without his little red pill, which, he says, paralyzes him with sleep
(or maybe it keeps him from hallucinating…).
 He listens to the night sounds and describes it as a hydroelectric
dam—"low, relentless, brute power."
 An orderly checks in on Chief. As he leaves, Chief sees his dorm
room slipping away, falling down, down, down. Finally the falling
stops, but the floor starts sliding forward, taking Chief on a ride
through the "machine" that is the asylum and the world.
 He sees a worker take Vegetable Blastic, another patient, and
hang him upside down by his heels.
 Another guy takes a scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic.
There’s no blood or guts, just rust, ashes, some wire, and glass.
 Chief hears someone chattering on and turns to see Public
Relation’s puffy and familiar face. The man is naked except for a
long undershirt and a corset (that sounds unattractive). Hanging
off of the corset are half a dozen withered objects, attached to bits
of hair like scalps (creepy).
 Public Relation is giving a tour to schoolteachers and college girls.
Suddenly, they come upon the gutted Blastic and a pupil gasps.
Public Relation reaches forward and spins one of Blastic’s hands.
 Public Relation starts to laugh, but then he rips Blastic off the hook
and ties him to his girdle like another trophy (along with those icky
bits of scalp).
 Then the fog begins to come in so Chief can’t see as much.
 Chief assures us, the reader, that this experience wasn’t just a
nightmare. He’s convinced that all of this was real.
 Mr. Turkle pulls him out of the nightmare by shaking him awake.
Turkle is the night aide, another black man, who smells like he’s
been drinking.
 Some nights, Mr. Turkle unties the sheet that keeps Chief in his bed
—but not tonight.
 Mr. Turkle helps two other orderlies lift old Blastic onto a stretcher
and carry him out, handling him more carefully than Chief has ever
seen them do before.

PART I, CHAPTER 8
 McMurphy has woken up before Chief, and he sings as he
comes out of the latrine.

 Nobody’s heard anyone sing in years and everybody is struck

silent. How come the orderlies haven’t shut him up yet?
 Everybody sees in an instant that McMurphy is different; he
won’t shrivel up like the rest of the patients have.
 Why’s he different? Because he doesn’t have anybody to care
about, to make him worried, to bring him to his knees. At least
that’s Chief’s theory.
 Chief comes out of the dorm room just in time to see McMurphy
leave the bathroom and ask an orderly for some toothpaste.
 The orderly responds that it’s ward policy to lock up the
toothpaste.
 You might be wondering what’s so dangerous about toothpaste
that it has to be locked up? McMurphy’s thinking the same
thing.
 The orderly’s only response is that locking up toothpaste is
simply ward policy, end of story. After all, what would happen if
everybody could brush their teeth whenever they wanted?
 I see, McMurphy responds, I can see why that would be a real
big problem. Why, people might be brushing their teeth at 6:10
or 6:20. They might even be brushing their teeth at 6:00!
 McMurphy finds some soap powder and decides to use that
instead.
 The orderly stares at McMurphy, completely confused.
 Chief watches McMurphy’s antics too and thinks that it’s doing
him some good to see the new guy messing with the orderly. It
reminds him of the time his father made fun of some
government men and got the better of them.
 Chief realizes that he’d forgotten what laughter can do for a
person.
 As soon as Big Nurse arrives, the orderly starts complaining to
her about McMurphy. At just that moment, they both hear
McMurphy singing.
 At first, Nurse Ratched is confused. Then she gets mad.
 With nostrils flaring, the control maniac Nurse Ratched heads
toward McMurphy, who has just hopped out of the shower and
is only wearing a towel.
 Nurse Ratched insists that he can’t go around in only a towel.
 McMurphy takes her literally and starts to take his towel off to
see if his birthday suit pleases her better. Before there’s any
exciting nude scenes, Nurse Ratched stops him from stripping.
Still, he lets her know that his clothes were stolen in the night,
so it’s either the towel or nothing.
 Even though Nurse Ratched explains that McMurphy is
supposed wear a green uniform like all the other asylum
patients, he assures her that there was no green uniform to be
found.
 Getting frustrated, the Big Nurse starts yelling at orderlies until
they finally locate a uniform for McMurphy.
 An orderly hands the green outfit to McMurphy with a look of
pure, clear hate.
 That’s when Chief and Big Nurse realize that McMurphy was
wearing his shorts with the white whales under his towel the
whole time. The shorts make Big Nurse even more furious.
 It takes her a minute to get herself under control.
 Then she dispatches the two orderlies who are hanging around.
Now out of view of any other staff members, the Big (angry)
Nurse looks around for a victim on whom she can take out her
rage. She sees Chief—but some other patients have shown up,
and she doesn’t want them to see her out of control.
 Nurse Ratched pulls herself together and begins her usual
morning routine of greeting each patient. Then she turns
around and tells McMurphy that he should stop trying to show
off his fine, manly physique and get into his greens.
 McMurphy goes off singing.
 Chief continues sweeping. When he’s sweeping under
McMurphy’s bed, he smells a scent of the outside—the smell of
a man’s sweat and dirt—which is so completely different from
the sour smells of the asylum, with all of its germicide, zinc
ointment, and powders.

PART I, CHAPTER 9
 At breakfast, McMurphy is loud, thinking Big Nurse is going to
be easy to break. Chief, however, observes that McMurphy
simply caught Nurse Ratched off-guard with the whole towel
episode. Chief honestly expects the Big Nurse to come back
stronger.
 McMurphy tries to goad Billy Bibbit into laughter by pretending
to reminisce about the two of them hooking up with some
prostitutes ("twitches") in Seattle. Of course this didn’t actually
happen; McMurphy is just messing around.
 Billy practically blushes and grins himself to death when
McMurphy makes up stories of hookers being impressed
by Billy’s 14-inch… well, you get the point.
 McMurphy seems pretty happy. He’s being served some decent
food, which is better than he ever got working on a farm.
 He flirts with the cook and the girl who pours coffee. He also
offersto pinch some food to give the orderly, who refuses
because it’s against ward policy to eat with the patients. So
McMurphy just eats three delicious bananas in front of the rule-
abiding orderly.
 The clock is lying, saying it’s only 7:15, when it should be
reading closer to 8 o’clock.
 McMurphy points out that the clock is like a target. Incessant
gambler that he is, he bets some of the Acutes that he can hit
face of the clock with a chunk of butter. Some of the Acutes put
money down and promptly win it back when McMurphy’s butter
ball hits the wall six inches to the left of the clock.
 McMurphy wins the money back after betting again about how
quickly the butter chunk will slide down the wall.
 McMurphy spends the morning playing blackjack. The constant
music playing in the day room is getting to him, though, so
finally he asks Big Nurse to turn it off.
 Nurse Ratched asserts her authority. She smiles and very
pleasantly says, "No." Then she informs him that he’s being
very selfish because the Chronics have no entertainment if they
don’t listen to music.
 McMurphy’s aware that everybody is listening in on the
conversation, so he asks if he and some of the Acutes can just
go into another room—one without music.
 Nurse Ratched sweetly informs McMurphy that there aren’t
enough staff members to watch over two day rooms. In other
words, "Sorry, sucker, I’m the boss around here."
 The big Ratched-McMurphy showdown has begun. Right now,
we’ll say the score is tied at 1 vs. 1, with McMurphy holding a
point for his obnoxious boxer shorts and Ratched scoring a goal
for annoying music.
 At 11, the doctor comes in and informs McMurphy that it’s
policy to interview new Admits on their second day. So off
McMurphy goes for a chat with the doctor.
 McMurphy is loud and happy and laughing. He’s even the first
in his chair for the 1:00 group meeting.
 Big Nurse comes in and starts the meeting by saying that
yesterday, they were making some real headway with Harding’s
problem (a.k.a. obsessive jealousy over his wife and her
breasts).
 The doctor interrupts and says he’d like to talk about something
new today. During his chat with McMurphy, he discovered that
the two of them went to the same high school.
 The nurses look at each other while the doctor continues.
 While the doctor and McMurphy are reminiscing, they get to
remembering the carnivals that the school always had. The
doctor wants to know, what would the men in the ward think
about having a carnival?
 Everybody remembers what happened to Taber a few years
back when he tried to organize a carnival. But finally Cheswick
gets up and says he thinks that a carnival is a great idea.
 Then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and mentions a
particular talent they have—like palm reading—that they could
perform for a carnival.
 Finally the doctor asks Nurse Ratched what she thinks. She
agrees that it might have some therapeutic benefits… but it
should be discussed in a staff meeting first. ( This woman is like
a Dementor from the Harry Potter books: she’s sucks the
happiness out of everything. )
 Everybody knows at this point that there will never be a
carnival.
 Because she’s a control freak, Nurse Ratched tries to bring the
meeting back on track. Before she can, though, McMurphy
snaps his fingers and says there’s one other thing Doctor
Spivey wants to discuss: the hard-of-hearing guys and the radio.
 Big Nurse’s head gives a little jerk.

 The doctor says that the mixed population is not the most ideal
for the Therapeutic Community, especially those hard of
hearing. He proposes an interesting solution: turn the music up
louder for the Chronics with "auditory weaknesses," and turn
the unused tub/storage room into a game room (second day
room) where there’s no music.
 The group doesn’t respond because they know Big Nurse is
about to make a move. She says that the doctor’s plan is
impossible because the ward doesn’t have the personnel to
watch over two day rooms.
 Well, the doctor has thought of this, too. Since it is the Chronic
patients who will remain in the day room with the music, and
most of them are confined to wheel chairs, one nurse and one
aide should be sufficient to keep down any riots, right?
 Suddenly, all the Acutes are on the doctor’s side.
 The doctor smiles and blushes, pleased to be so popular. He
says that now that the logistics are handled, what will they be
discussing today in the group meeting? Apparently he doesn’t
realize how much he’s riled up Nurse Ratched.
 Big Nurse jerks her head again and picks up a folder from her
basket. It looks like her hands are shaking.
 McMurphy speaks up again. He wants to discuss what his
dream the other night meant. It was him in the dream but he
also looked like his daddy who had iron bolted through his
jaw….
 The Big Nurse looks calm, patient, and terribly, terribly cold. It’s
like she’s thinking, "I can wait. I can outwait you all."
 Chief reflects that for a minute, he thought she was whipped.
Now he realizes that she wasn’t, even though McMurphy
seemed to be on top for the moment. In other words, the score
is 2 McMurphy, 1 Ratched. But, the battle isn’t anywhere close
to being over.
 Nurse Ratched switches on the fog machine. (Not literally. This
seems to be the way Chief describes losing consciousness.)
 Chief sinks back into the fog. The happiness he felt a few
moments ago has been replaced with hopeless.
 He’s glad when the fog gets so thick that he can lose himself in
it again.

PART I, CHAPTER 10
 McMurphy, Cheswick, Martini, and Harding are
playing Monopolyin the day room. They are using actual money
—with one penny equaling a dollar—so the board is weighted
down with change.
 The games goes on and on, with the men teasing each other
andgiving each other a hard time.
 PART I, CHAPTER 11
 Chief says that there are entire days lost to the fog. Most of the
men don’t realize they’re caught in it, but Chief does. If
McMurphy knows he’s lost in the fog, he doesn’t let on that it
bothers him.
 No matter what the nurses or orderlies do to McMurphy, he
keeps his temper. Occasionally, a stupid rule will make him
mad, but he expresses his anger by being extra polite until he
sees how funny it is that the nurses treat the men like children.
This is so absurd to him that he can’t help laughing.
 One time he does lose control. Surprisingly, it’s not because of
the orderlies or Big Nurse; the problem is his fellow patients.
 It happens at a group meeting. McMurphy had been getting the
guys to bet on the World Series and he asks Nurse Ratched if
she can switch the cleaning schedule so the patients can watch
the television in the afternoon. Of course, Nurse Ratched says
rules are rules and the answer is a big fat "No."
 McMurphy was expecting that response. What bugs him is that
the Acutes just give in. In Chief’s words, the men "sink back out
of sight in little pockets of fog." In McMurphy’s words, the men
are "too chicken-shit."
 McMurphy tries to get them to speak up, considering that they
have a little "personal interest" in watching the games,
meaning that they’ve bet money on it.
 Finally one of them says he’s just used to watching the 6
o’clock news. If switching the schedules would mess everything
up as bad as Miss Ratched says…
 McMurphy tries to take a vote. Cheswick is the only patient to
vote with McMurphy. Scanlon finally half-votes. Nobody else will
raise a hand.
 So Big Nurse continues on with the group meeting.
 After the meeting, McMurphy’s so mad that he refuses to say a
word to anybody.
 Billy Bibbit that tries to explain to McMurphy that some of the
men have been in the ward for five years, and most of them will
still be there when McMurphy leaves. Finally, Billy gives up
trying to explain.
 McMurphy argues with a few of the guys for the rest of the
afternoon. Nobody even wants gamble anymore because
McMurphy took all their money in a few games. (He stopped
letting them win.)
 Harding points out that McMurphy has been with them for a
week without overthrowing the government.
 Chief suddenly feels like a spy. He imagines the mop handle in
his hands is made of metal and it’s hollow. Inside, there’s a
miniature microphone allowing Big Nurse to listen in.
 McMurphy manages to get half the Acutes to agree to vote with
him if he brings up the issue of watching the baseball game
again. He says he doesn’t understand why more won’t join him,
especially Harding.
 The Acutes try to explain that a baseball game isn’t worth
getting on Nurse Ratched’s wrong side.
 Feeling insulted, Frederickson tries to dare McMurphy to smash
his way out of the ward through the window. But Cheswick tells
McMurphy to forget it because the windows are made specially
so that you can’t break them with a chair.
 McMurphy is seriously considering breaking out of the asylum.
He suggests a table might be big enough to bash the window.
 Cheswick says a table is no different than a chair.
 McMurphy says he’ll have to think about it until he comes up
with a plan to bust out. Basically he says, "If you fellas don’t
think I’ll break out, then you’ve got another thing coming."
 Next, McMurphy asks if a bed would do the trick. Or a steel
panel?
 Somebody says McMurphy can’t lift a steel panel, so the ever-
competitive McMurphy bets them that he can.
 He tries and strains really hard, but it’s true; McMurphy can’t lift
the panel. He gives up.
 McMurphy then looks at the guys and starts fumbling around for
theIOUs he won in the last few days. He tries to sort them out,
but his fingers are frozen. Finally, he just throws the whole
bundle onto the floor—representing forty or fifty dollars from
each guy—and he turns to walk out.
 "But I tried, though," he says. "Goddammit, I sure as hell did
that much, now, didn’t I?"
 He walks out the door, leaving the IOUs behind for those who
want them.

PART I, CHAPTER 12
 A visiting doctor is addressing the residents when Chief comes
past, sweeping the floor.
 He pushes the broom past a picture that Public Relation brought
to the ward a while back. It’s a picture of a man fly-fishing in
the mountains. Chief can practically smell the snow and feel the
cold wind that the fisherman is experiencing.
 Chief says it’s so easy to forget what it was like at the old
hospital, when they didn’t have nice images like this on the
walls for you to "climb into" and lose yourself. Basically, this
ward is a step up from that last place, where there was no TV,
just walls and chairs and confinement jackets.
 Public Relation says that they’ve "come a long way" since those
old, awful hospitals. Now things are so nice that a person would
have to be crazy to want to run away.
 In the staff room, the skinny visiting doctor is shivering as if he
were in the freezing cold. Chief thinks that maybe the doctor
also feels the snow and cold wind from the picture.
 PART I, CHAPTER 13
 This chapter is so short, we’re just going to type it out for you to
read:
 "It’s getting hard to locate my bed at night, I have to crawl
around on my hands and knees feeling underneath the springs
till I find my gobs of gum stuck there. Nobody complains about
the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it
and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us
wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog,
out in the open where we’d be easy to get at."
 PART I, CHAPTER 14
 This chapter is ultra short too. And easy to understand. Here’s
the entire chapter:
 "There’s a shipment of frozen parts come in downstairs—hearts
and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble
into cold storage down the storage chute. A guy sitting in the
room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on
Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled
to death, sitting right on the can [toilet] in the latrine
[bathroom], half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it
till he fell off to the floor, dead.
"What makes people so impatient [to die] is what I can’t figure;
all the guy had to do was wait."

PART I, CHAPTER 15
 Chief knows how "they" work a fog machine because he used a
fog machine overseas during the war. If his platoon suspected a
surprise attack or bombing, they would fog the field to reduce
visibility.
 The fog on the ward is something that Chief loses himself in,
sometimes so deeply that he forgets where he is. He used to
get so scared by the fog that he’d yell to be found—and end up
in the Shock Shop.
 Now, Chief had decided it’s better to be lost and quiet than to
yell and be found.
 While Chief is busy cleaning the floors near the Nurses’ Station,
he hear Big Nurse on the phone telling the doctor that it’s time
to discuss McMurphy and whether he should be on the ward or
not.
 Chief realizes that’s why she’s fogging the ward for the
meeting —so she can secretly do something to McMurphy.
 Through the fog, Chief hears Billy Bibbit describe how he
flunked out of college. Big Nurse asking him if he can remember
when he first started to stutter (Billy speaks with a stutter).
 Then everything fades. A chair comes floating out of the fog to
the right. Then a Chronic, Colonel Matterson, floats into sight.
He’s slowly reading things that are written on his yellow hand.
Chief follows along with what Matterson is reading, something
about Mexico being an acorn, a hazelnut, a rainbow, and so
much more.
 Apparently Matterson has been babbling nonsense for the
entire six years that he’s been on the ward. Only now,
everything Matterson is saying seems to make sense to Chief.
 To his left, Chief sees old Pete, who’s talking about how tired he
is.
 Chief can see how hurt old Pete is, and realizes that Pete's pain
is like Chief’s pain from the war.
 Billy Bibbit comes floating by, to explain how he screwed up a
marriage proposal.
 I can’t help you, Billy, Chief thinks. Nobody can.
 During the war, Chief saw his friend tied to a tree, screaming for
water. He was supposed to go help his friend, but was afraid
that he’d be killed by the enemies.
 The faces keep going past Chief in the fog.
 He wonders if this is what it’s like to be a Vegetable.
 Chief sees his father hunting in the woods, taking aim at a
buck. He misses several times and Chief has to take the buck
down.
 He hears McMurphy arguing with Big Nurse about changing the
cleaning schedule so the men can watch the World Series. Chief
feels that McMurphy is trying to pull Chief out of his safety
again.
 McMurphy wants to call another vote to push Nurse Ratched to
change the cleaning schedule.
 It’s the group meeting and Big Nurse asks if anybody has
thought that McMurphy is imposing his desires on everybody
else too much.
 A patient named Scanlon sticks up for McMurphy, saying that
there’s no harm in a vote or changing the cleaning schedule. He
challenges the nurse, saying she probably wants to ship
McMurphy off to the Disturbed Ward just for asking for another
vote.
 McMurphy says he wants to see which of these "birds" has guts
to stand up for what they want.
 So they vote.
 Chief can tell the first hand that goes up is McMurphy’s. Other
hands come up through the fog. In fact, all twenty of them raise
their hands in a vote against Nurse Ratched and against the
way she’s been running the ward for so long.
 But Big Nurse has her way. Though all twenty Acutes voted for
him, there are a total of forty patients on the ward if you
include the Chronics. So he failed to get a majority.
 Nurse Ratched politely says, "I’m afraid the vote is closed." The
tally for the Ratched-McMurphy showdown is now McMurphy 2,
Ratched 2. Or is it?
 McMurphy is seriously mad but Nurse appeals to the doctor.
Isn’t she being fair? And the doctor backs her up.
 McMurphy gets more and more angry because she has been so
unfair. Meanwhile, Nurse Ratched suggests that they wrap up
the group meeting early today due to McMurphy’s disturbance.
 McMurphy tries to get one of the Chronics named Ellis to vote,
but the man doesn’t raise his hand.
 Now McMurphy’s standing in front of Chief, asking him to vote.
 Big Nurse thinks she’s completely defeated McMurphy and is
already packing up her papers.
 For some reason, Chief is raises his hand. He tells the reader
that McMurphy put a hex on him and his hand is raising of its
own accord.
 No. Chief corrects himself. He’s lifting his hand of his own
accord.
 McMurphy whoops and hollers. Cheswick adds a "Yippee."
 Nurse Ratched says with a smile "The meeting was closed." As
she turns and walks away, Chief sees that her neck is red and
swelling, like she’s so mad she’s going to explode.
 She doesn’t blow up right away, though. She waits in the
Nurses’ Station behind the glass.
 It’s game time and McMurphy turns on the television while Big
Nurse’s face gets redder and redder.
 Everybody’s watching what she’s going to do, even the
orderlies and nurses.
 Nurse Ratched, from behind the glass of the Nurses’ Station,
flips a switch and turns the TV off.
 McMurphy pretends he doesn’t notice that the picture is gone.
He just sits back, lights a cigarette, and acts like he’s watching
the game.
 Big Nurse waits a while and then she comes to the door and
tells McMurphy that he’s supposed to be working with the other
men on house chores during these hours. Her anger is showing.
"I’m warning you!" she says.
 Nurse Ratched is losing her cool and everyone’s watching.
She’s a control freak and can’t help but say, "You are… under
the jurisdictionof me…" Oops. Did she mean to say that? She
corrects herself to say "the staff" instead of "me." But she
keeps losing it, making a fist and using words like "control."
 Slowly, the men stop doing their house chores and sit down in
front of the TV with McMurphy.
 Ratched complains and moans, and shrieks and shouts, but the
men just sit in front of the TV and watch a perfectly blank
screen.
 The new battle score is definitely now McMurphy 3, Ratched 2.
 Chief says that if somebody came in not knowing the situation,
they’d think all of the men watching the TV were "crazy as
loons."

PART II, CHAPTER 1

 Everybody’s watching Big Nurse to see what she’ll do.
 Chief remembers he’s supposed to be cleaning the staff room,
but he’s too afraid to move.
 One of the orderlies, waiting near the door, watches Chief for a
long time. Then he comes over, puts a bucket of soap and
water on Chief’s arm, and tells Chief it’s time to get to work.
 Chief doesn’t move. The bucket swings on his arm. The orderly
helps Chief to his feet and down the hall.
 Big Nurse goes into the day room.
 Chief notices the light seeping out of the staff room, a green
light. He says that whenever the staff meeting is over, there’s a
green seepage all over the walls and chairs that he has to clean
off. He says poisons seep right out of the staff’s skin. Chief’s job
is to clean away the poison seepage.
 Big Nurse lets Chief into the staff room and he notices that her
face is back to normal.
 Nurse Ratched glares at him and Chief knows she’s wondering
how Chief heard McMurphy asking him to vote. None of the
other Chronics had responded to McMurphy.
 Chief turns his back to her and starts to clean off the green
slime. He pretends not to be aware of her standing behind him,
glaring away.
 But then she realizes that the rest of the staff are staring at her.
 The doctor starts the staff meeting. Notice how everyone
assumes that Chief is totally deaf, which allows him to spy on
the staff meeting.
 The meeting is about McMurphy who, in Nurse Ratched’s words,
is "a disturbance on the ward."
 At this point in a normal staff meeting, Nurse Ratched usually
takes over, but today she says nothing. The doctor is forced to
continue the meeting his own.
 The doctor admits that McMurphy is not a "normal" man and
expresses Nurse Ratched’s desire to "unify" the staff’s opinions
and actions toward him.
 Still, Big Nurse doesn’t help him out.
 So the doctor asks the rest of the nurses what they think.
 They begin to discuss McMurphy. One of the orderlies suggests
he isn’t mentally ill at all but a very shrewd man.
 He makes a mistake saying that. Everybody stares at him and
he’s rebuked for such an absurd idea. Anybody can see that
McMurphy is not normal. He is a Napoleon, a Genghis Khan, an
Attila the Hun.
 The rest agree that he displays marked hostility and rebellion—
which is clearly a mark of being insane rather than being
oppressed.
 So the question becomes whether or not he should be sent
upstairs to the Disturbed Ward.
 Everybody comes to an agreement. Really, they just do what
they think Nurse Ratched wants.
 Finally, one of the staff members says that they are not dealing
with an ordinary man.
 This is when Big Nurse finally jumps in. She tells the staff
member that he’s very wrong.
 Now everybody’s confused. Wasn’t this what she wanted?
 Big Nurse continues on to say that she doesn’t think McMurphy
should be sent up to Disturbed Ward because that wouldn’t be
fixing the problem, it would just be passing him along to
another ward. Also, she doesn’t think he’s some kind of super
psychopath.
 Nobody wants to disagree with her. Chief thinks about the color
of her lipstick—red-orange—and thinks it can’t be lipstick. It’s
fire and it’s part of her.
 Nurse Ratched informs everyone that at first she thought he
should go to the Disturbed Ward, but now she thinks it’s too
late for that. She worries that by removing him, they’d be
turning him into a martyr in the eyes of the other patients. In
other words, the patients would never get the chance to see
that he’s just an ordinary man, after all.
 She thinks that if they keep him on the ward, his brashness and
bravado will soon subside and everybody will begin to recognize
that he’s not extraordinary at all.
 She’s sure that McMurphy is too fond of himself to do anything
to put himself in real danger.
 Somebody points out that this scheme could take weeks.
 Well, Big Nurse says, what’s the rush? Nurse Ratched points out
that they (meaning she) is in control of how long he stays in the
asylum, so it’s not like he’ll be leaving any time soon. She can
take as long to break him as she wants.

PART II, CHAPTER 2

 Chief admits that although he’s worried, nothing seems to
happen. McMurphy is just as hard on Nurse Ratched and the
orderlies as always.
 McMurphy’s assigned to clean out the bathrooms, and he
personally thanks Nurse Ratched for giving him that job. But he
doesn’t do much to actually clean them. When Big Nurse
checks on his work, she takes a little compact mirror to look
under the rims and says his work is outrageously bad.
 In the afternoon, everybody lines up in front of the gray TV.
Instead of watching the baseball game, they listen to McMurphy
tell stories.
 He’s so confident while telling his stories that Chief stops
worrying. He thinks McMurphy must be strong enough to resist
Nurse Ratched.
 But Chief is also noticing all of McMurphy’s vulnerabilities—like
how he paints beautiful pictures or how he got worried and
upset one time over a letter he received.
 Chief is also noticing that the fog machine seems to be turned
off lately. He’s seeing all sorts of things differently.
 One night Chief wakes up and, instead of seeing smoke and
machinery and wires, he just sees the dorm. So he gets out of
bed and goes to the window and, for the first time ever, notices
 that the hospital is out in the country. He smells the scent of fall
and it reminds him of how he used to go hunting with his father.
 He watches a dog outside until an orderly and a nurse come
pull him away from the window.
 Chief thinks about how the cross around Big Nurse's neck can’t
keep the poison inside her from oozing out. She blames her
inner poison on working with people like Chief.
 While the nurse goes to get some medication for Chief, the
orderly prepares him to get back in bed.

PART II, CHAPTER 3

 Suddenly, the afternoon meetings have turned into gripe
sessions. The men, who have long been silent, start to barrage
Nurse Ratched with a list of complaints. They want to know why
they can never be alone, or why they can’t sleep in late on the
weekends like normal people do, or why she controls their
cigarettes when they’ve bought the cigarettes themselves.
 McMurphy is surprised that Nurse Ratched and the staff haven’t
applied more pressure on him to stop creating this rebellion of
the Acutes.
 But Wednesday of the next week, things change. Wednesday is
the day when everybody is packed up and taken to the
swimming pool, regardless of whether they want to go or not.
 Chief is scared of water, so he stays close to McMurphy while
the orderlies herd everybody into the water.
 McMurphy is treading water (while Chief is just standing) and
talking to the lifeguard. (Gives you an idea of how tall Chief
must be.)
 McMurphy tells the lifeguard that the hospital is better than
prison, but the lifeguard isn’t so sure. According to the
lifeguard, at least when you go to jail, you know when you’re
going to be let out.
 McMurphy stops splashing around suddenly and asks, "And if
you’re committed?"
 That’s when he finds out that the lifeguard was picked up for
being drunk and disorderly—and now he’s been committed for
eight years. Nurse Ratched just keeps telling the doctor that he
isn’t ready to leave.
 McMurphy begins think about the lifeguard’s argument. He’d
had a six month sentence at the farm (kind of a forced labor
jail) with only four months to go. He’d been in the asylum for a
month.
 McMurphy swims to the shallow end of the pool and frowns as
he thinks to himself. Suddenly, Chief is afraid.
 The next day, McMurphy gets up early and polishes the
bathroom until it shines, just as the orderlies requested. He
surprises everybody—except for Big Nurse.
 When Cheswick complains about the cigarette situation during
the afternoon meeting, he asks McMurphy to back him
up.McMurphy remains silent.
 Cheswick starts to throw a temper tantrum and the orderlies
drag him away.
 Nurse Ratched asks if anybody else wants to discuss the
cigarettes. Everybody is silent.
 Some of the Acutes decide that McMurphy is still outsmarting
the Big Nurse, even though he’s stopped standing up for them.
They speculate that he’s planning something big or that he’s
trying to avoid getting sent to the Disturbed Ward.
 In reality, Nurse Ratched has scored another point, and the
score is tied at 3 for McMurphy and 3 for Ratched, but it just
doesn’t seem like a game anymore.
 Chief knows the deal. McMurphy is giving in because it’s the
smart thing to do. Unlike in his jail sentence, Nurse Ratched can
hold McMurphy in the asylum indefinitely.
 Then one day, everybody knows all at once why McMurphy has
given in. They don’t hold it against him, but they wish it didn’t
have to be that way.
 Cheswick tells McMurphy that he understands. But he still
wishes something could be done.
 That same day, when the group goes to the pool, Cheswick
dives down to the bottom and grabs onto the grate so no one
can pull him out. He drowns.
 PART II, CHAPTER 4
 Sefelt has an epileptic fit while in line for lunch. As the orderlies
and Nurse Ratched get him under control, Nurse Ratched
smilingly points out that Sefelt has been claiming that he had
no more need for medication.
 Frederickson, another patient, gets upset and accuses Big
Nurse of trying to crucify Sefelt.
 Nurse Ratched merely says that Sefelt hasn’t been swallowing
his Dilantin (medicine), but everybody knows—including Nurse
Ratched—that he holds his capsules in his mouth and gives
them to Frederickson later. Frederickson is also epileptic and
likes to have a double dose, while Sefelt prefers to take no
medicine.
 Nurse Ratched asks Frederickson if taking his medication isn’t
better than what Sefelt has just suffered?
 Chief describes Sefelt’s jerking around as similar to the way
men jerk around when they’ve been subjected to electroshock
therapy in the Shock Shop.
 When she leaves, Frederickson shivers and says he’s not sure
why he got so mad at Nurse Ratched.
 McMurphy asks what’s the big deal about taking the medicine if
it prevents seizures?
 Frederickson pulls his mouth open and shows how the Dilantin
causes a person’s gums to rot.
 Scanlon, another patient, walks away, saying, "Damned if you
do and damned if you don’t."
 McMurphy looks at Sefelt and says, "Yeah, I see what you
mean."
 PART II, CHAPTER 5
 The system of control in the ward is coming back into place.
Whatever got fouled up when McMurphy arrive has almost been
fixed.
 Everything is back to routine again: six-thirty out of bed, seven
to the mess hall….

PART II, CHAPTER 6

 Sometimes, the staff takes Chief on trips with the Acutes, like to
the library. Chief looks at all the books, especially the technical
books, which remind him of his year in college. He wants to
open a book but he’s afraid.
 One of the orderlies arrives with Harding’s wife, Vera. She blows
the orderly a kiss, then starts to move (a.k.a. sway her hips)
toward Harding.
 Harding doesn’t move toward her but he looks around and
realizes everybody’s watching.
 He calls over to McMurphy to come meet his "nemesis."
 McMurphy comes over to meet her and they sit down to talk
about how McMurphy got the best of the Nurse Ratched.
 As they talk, Harding begins to chide his wife for her bad
grammar, which she resents.
 Vera complains that Harding’s friends are always dropping by
her house, which leads Harding to asks who they’re coming to
see.
 She says that any man who comes to see her flips around more
than his own "limp wrists."
 Then she leaves.
 Harding asks what McMurphy thinks, which leads McMurphy to
say that Vera’s got a pretty big "set of chabobs." But when
Harding asks for opinions beyond his wife’s physical
appearance, McMurphy gets mad.
 McMurphy says he isn’t a marriage counselor. He clues in to the
fact that Harding wants McMurphy’s sympathy, and to be all,
"yeah, man, she’s a total monster." The problem is, McMurphy
doesn’t think that Harding treated Vera well either, and he says
so.
 He finishes by telling everybody to leave him the hell alone.
Then he walks back across the room to the other side.
 All the Acutes are startled and confused by McMurphy’s
outburst.
 That night at dinner, McMurphy apologizes to Harding. He says
it’s because he’s been having bad dreams all week. When
Harding asks what he’s seeing in these dreams, McMurphy
admits it’s just faces.
 The next morning, a patient named Martini is playing with the
control panel in the tub room while everybody else is gambling.
Martini’s trying to turn the water on, but nothing comes out.
 Suddenly, though, he jumps back as if he’s scared and asks
McMurphy if he sees them.
 McMurphy says he doesn’t see anything.
 Martini persists. He didn’t see any of them?
 McMurphy says no.
 Martini claims he was just kidding—he didn’t see anything
either.
 McMurphy says he doesn’t care for that kind of kidding. Turning
away from Martini, he goes back to shuffling the cards, only the
cards spill out everywhere because his hands are trembling.

PART II, CHAPTER 7

 It’s a Friday and everybody is taken for X-rays to check for
tuberculosis. Chief knows the orderlies are actually checking to
see if all their inside machinery is operating OK.
 Next to the X-ray room is the Shock Shop.
 When orderlies take someone to electroshock therapy, they
drug the patient and then drag him inside. As the orderlies
bring patients out, they’re still smoking—not cigarettes either.
It’s more like they’re sizzling from the electric shocks.
 McMurphy asks what’s going in the room next door. Harding
explains that it’s a Shock Shop, a free trip to the moon. Wait, he
adds, it isn’t free. You pay with brain cells rather than money.
 What the hell are they doing it for? McMurphy asks.
 For the patient’s good, of course, Harding responds.
 Why doesn’t the public get outraged? McMurphy wants to know.
 Because, Harding responds, the public wants things fixed and
they want it fixed the quickest possible way.
 McMurphy points out that it’s like electrocuting somebody for
murder.
 Harding says that in both cases, the electrocution is a cure.
 Harding tells McMurphy that a trip to the Shock Shop doesn’t
hurt. Still, nobody wants another treatment because it makes
you change. You forget things. Then there’s a "wild carnival
wheel of images, emotions, memories" in your head. You don’t
know where the wheel will stop.
 McMurphy admits that he doesn’t understand electroshock
therapy and he definitely doesn’t understand the asylum.
 Harding assures McMurphy that he’s unlikely to visit the Shock
Shop because that’s only for people with extreme cases. Same
with lobotomies.
 That’s when McMurphy finds out that Nurse Ratched has a say-
so over who gets lobotomies, too (scary).
 They start to discuss Nurse Ratched and McMurphy says he
thinks she’s only part of the problem. If she was gone, the
system would still continue.
 The rest of the Acutes don’t agree but Chief understands what
McMurphy’s talking about. It’s what Chief calls the Combine—
the machine-like nature of the way the system works.
 Most of the guys think that the only problem is Nurse Ratched
needing some sex. McMurphy points out that if sex was the real
issue, the solution would be just to throw her down and solve
her worries.
 The guys really do think that’s the Big Nurse’s problem, and
that McMurphy’s the man to fix it. But, McMurphy’s all "hell no."
Who can blame him?
 Harding accuses McMurphy of "conforming to policy" just to get
an early release from the asylum.
 McMurphy’s not hiding anything and says that’s he’s definitely
hoping for an early release. In fact, he blames Harding for not
telling him the risk he was running when he first arrived.
McMurphy thinks that the patients should have warned him
because he’s got as much to lose by staying here as the rest of
them.
 Harding points out that McMurphy is wrong on that point.
McMurphy is committed. Harding, on the other hand,
is voluntary—he can leave whenever he wants. In fact, only a
 few men on the ward are committed—Scanlon, the Chronics,
and McMurphy.
 McMurphy now getting scared. And angry.
 McMurphy asks Billy if he’s committed and Billy shakes his
head.
 If he’s not committed, McMurphy wants to know why on earth
Billy would stay in the asylum.
 What about you, Sefelt? He asks. You could get along outside—
if you had the guts.
 Billy screams suddenly. Sure they could, if they had guts. Billy
starts freaking out and saying he doesn’t want to be in the
asylum, he’s only there because he doesn’t have the guts to
live on the Outside. By now, Billy’s crying and stuttering.
 McMurphy turns around to speak, but stops when he sees the
way the men are all looking at him.
 McMurphy simply says, "Hell’s bells," and goes back to sit on
the bench. He looks at the Shock Shop door and murmurs about
how he can’t get it all straight in his head.

PART II, CHAPTER 8

 Chief and McMurphy walk back to the ward together. Chief
wants to tell him not to worry about it. He’s about to speak
when McMurphy speeds up and joins an orderly to ask him if
they can stop by the canteen.
 Chief runs to catch up with McMurphy, which makes his heart
pound.
 In the canteen, Chief is still excited and impatient. His
heartbeat makes ringing noise in his head.
 McMurphy buys three cartons of cigarettes, explaining that he
plans to do a lot of smoking.
 At the afternoon group meeting, the topic of discussion is
getting Sefelt to adjust to his problems.
 Chief gets alarmed when he sees how McMurphy looks: reckless
and excited. The ringing in his head continues.
 Frederickson complains about their cigarettes being kept at the
Nurses’ Station.
 In the last few minutes of the meeting, Nurse Ratched speaks
up. She and the doctor have decided that the men should be
 punished for refusing to do their house duties three weeks ago
(when the men wanted to watch the World Series).
 She continues lecturing, claiming that the rules and regulations
in the asylum are carefully thought out and for the good of the
patients. The rules help those who couldn’t adjust to the rules
in the Outside World.
 Nurse Ratched says that she’s taking away one of their
privileges as punishment. After carefully thought, the staff has
decided to take away the use of the tub room (the second day
room the men have been playing cards in). Is this unfair, she
asks?
 One by one, each man looks at McMurphy. They look at him
with a face full of hope.
 He grins at everybody as Big Nurse starts to conclude the
meeting.
 Finally, Nurse Ratched looks over at McMurphy. He slaps both
hands on his knees, stretches and yawns, and then walks
across the day-room floor toward her.
 The Big Nurse begins to look afraid. She hadn’t thought he’d
actually do anything.
 She looks around for the orderlies, but McMurphy stops before
he reaches her. He says he thinks he could use one of those
cigarettes he bought this morning. And then he smashes his
hand through the glass into the Nurses’ Station.
 He takes one out a pack of cigarettes and then returns to where
the Big Nurse is sitting. He tenderly brushes the slivers of
broken glass from her hat and shoulders.
 He apologizes to Nurse Ratched, claiming that he completely
forgot there was glass dividing the day room from the Nurses’
Station.
 Then he walks away, leaving her sitting there.
 The noise in Chief’s head finally stops.
 We’re not even counting the score of the Ratched-McMurphy
battle anymore. The situation has become really serious.
 PART III, CHAPTER 1
 Nurse Ratched leaves McMurphy alone for a long time after
that, biding her time. But everybody knows she isn’t about to
recommend that he be released from the asylum.
 McMurphy’s now making things "pretty interesting" on the
ward. He starts a basketball team, to which Big Nurse objects.
However, the doctor points that it’s good for the men to be part
of a team sport.
 The doctor is also showing a little spirit, of which Nurse Ratched
takes note.
 Whenever Nurse Ratched and McMurphy speak to each other,
they are extremely polite. He starts to request an
Unaccompanied Leave, which he’s allowed to do after one
month, but Big Nurse keeps turning him down.
 Finally, McMurphy calmly puts his fist through the glass window
in the Nurses’ Station again.
 The Acutes’ basketball team plays against a team made up of
aides and orderlies.
 McMurphy is full of tricks to try to get under Big Nurse’s skin
and the other Acutes begin to imitate his behavior. Big Nurse
has a full-scale rebellion on her hands.
 McMurphy tries to get a pass to leave the ward and go fishing.
Even though it passes in the group, Big Nurse reads a
newspaper clipping that says the ocean is dangerous this time
of year and that McMurphy should rethink the fishing trip.
 McMurphy thinks about it and decides is a great time for fishing
because it will allow men to be men and brave the dangers of
the sea.
 So the next day, he gets the patients to start signing up to go
on the trip. At the same time, Big Nurse continues to bring in
clippings about wrecked ships.
 These clippings scare the men. They’re not used to the Outside
world and Nurse Ratched knows that. They’ve been trained to
be intimidated.
 Chief wants to sign up to go, but if he does, then that's
practically admitting to everyone that he can hear. He thinks
about it at night, wondering if he can act any way other than
the way he’s been acting the last ten years.
 Chief remembers that he wasn’t the one who started acting
deaf—other people just started acting like Chief was too dumb
to understand.
 At this point, Chief tells a story within a story about some white
people coming into his tribe’s town. They were hoping to build a
hydroelectric dam on the tribal land. We enter into a flashback:
 Two men and an old woman show up in the tribe’s town. They
blabber on and on about how they find it unbelievable that
people can live like this, even going so far as to call Chief’s
father’s house a "hovel." They refuse to go inside the house to
talk business with Chief’s father.
 These people are essentially talking as if they assume that
Chief doesn’t understand English.
 Chief lets them talk for awhile before speaking up to say that
their house is a lot cooler than houses in town.
 The men act like they don’t hear him at all.
 As he watches the men ignoring him, it’s like time stops. Then a
hen walks by them and time begins moving again.
 One of the men says that whatever offer they make on "this…
metropolis" will be "quite sufficient."
 One of the men says he still thinks they should make an effort
to speak with the Chief.
 The old woman with them says, "No," the same way as the Big
Nurse does. She thinks they should spread the word about the
advantages of the hydroelectric dam and everything will fall
into place.
 They get back in their car and drive away. Chief wonders if they
even saw him.
 The flashback ends here.
 Chief lies awake and realizes that he hears a sound under his
bed. He looks and sees one of the orderlies scraping the gum
off the underside of Chief’s bed.
 Chief jerks back into bed, afraid the orderly will realize that he’s
not deaf (because he was startled by the scraping noise).
 McMurphy wakes up and asks the orderly what the devil he’s
doing at his time of night.
 The orderly admits he’s been watching Chief for years,
wondering where the guy got his gum since he never buys any
in the canteen. And now he’s found Chief’s stash.
 McMurphy giggles.
 When the orderly leaves, McMurphy whispers to Chief to tell
him something and he starts singing him a hillbilly song about
the Spearmint gum.
 At first, Chief gets mad, thinking McMurphy is making fun of
him. Then he realizes that it is funny and he wants to laugh at
himself. Finally, he starts to chuckle.
 McMurphy jumps right up and Chief stops. Then McMurphy
hands him some Juicy Fruit gum.
 Chief says, "Thank you."
 McMurphy just watches him. Then he tells Chief his voice
sounds out of practice, but that Chief is welcome to practice
speaking because they’ve got until 6:30am to chat.
 McMurphy sees that Chief can’t talk, so he starts the
conversation himself.
 He tells Chief about a time when he was the only kid among a
group of workers and nobody would listen to him. So he
stopped talking for four weeks. After that, the other men forgot
McMurphy could talk at all. On the last day, he opened his
mouth and told them what a bunch of farts they were, and how
they betrayed each other and talked about each other behind
their backs. Then they listened to him!
 McMurphy wants to know if Chief is just waiting until the time is
right to lay into everyone too?
 Chief says no. He insists that he’s not big and tough like
McMurphy.
 McMurphy says that’s ridiculous because Chief is physically way
larger than everyone else on the ward.
 Chief says that he used to be big, but now he’s half McMurphy’s
size. He explains how his mother used to be little and his father
was as large as Chief himself. Eventually, though, his mother
managed to get to be bigger than both father and son put
together. Chief is talking psychologically here, not physically.
 Chief tells McMurphy that everybody worked on his father just
like they’re working on McMurphy. That’s how his father got to
be so small.
 That’s why you shouldn’t have broken the window, Chief says.
They see you’re big now and they have to bust you. They’ll
 work on you in ways that you can’t fight. They install machinery
until you’re fixed.
 Then he says that his father finally took to the drink. They
didn’t kill him, he says, they did something else.
 Then he asks McMurphy if he’s talking crazy. McMurphy says
yes—but that doesn’t mean that what he said didn’t make
sense.
 McMurphy stops talking.
 Chief stares at McMurphy and wants to touch him. At first
Chief’s worried that he’s gay for wanting to touch another man,
but then he thinks, "If I was one of these queers I'd want to do
other things with him. I just want to touch him because he's
who he is.”
 McMurphy invites him to go on the fishing trip, but Chief says
he’s broke and can’t afford it.
 Then McMurphy asks Chief if he could lift the control panel in
the tub room (the one that McMurphy was totally unable to pick
up) back when he was in his prime. Chief says he thinks so.
 McMurphy again asks whether Chief could pick up that panel if
he got to be big again, the size he was when he was younger.
Again, Chief says yes.
 McMurphy says he'll pay for Chief to come on the fishing trip if
Chief can lift that panel. But let’s keep it a secret, he says.
 McMurphy says they’ll have a real trip. He gets up and says
he’s going out right this minute to sign Chief’s name up to the
fishing trip list. He also tells says that Chief has grown half a
foot already.
 PART III, CHAPTER 2
 In the morning, Chief sees his name signed up for the fishing
trip and he gets really excited.
 The orderlies are wondering who signed up Chief’s name.
 Chief acts deaf to their laughing at him but when they stick a
broom out to him to do some work, he turns around and walks
the other way. He has never before refused to do what they ask
of him.
 McMurphy is in the dorm making a fuss so the orderlies leave
Chief alone.
 The Acutes get ready for the trip, while the Chronics wander
around and stare at Chief. He feels guilty because he’s the only
Chronic invited (or going) on the trip.
 McMurphy tries to talk one more Acute into going, but the
remaining Acutes are too scared because of Big Nurse’s stories
about the rough sea.
 Old Swede (also known as Rub-a-Dub George) starts to tell
McMurphy that the red worms he’s planning to use for bait
won’t work. They need herring.
 McMurphy says George seems to know a thing or two about
fishing, and George admits that he worked as a fisherman for
twenty-five years.
 McMurphy declares George will be their captain.
 George is tempted but he doesn’t want to risk getting dirty.
 McMurphy asks him if it’s true that the ocean could be risky this
time of year.
 George replies that it’s true. Then he starts twisting his hands
around his shirt and asks if McMurphy thinks he’s afraid of
Nurse Ratched’s stories.
 At last, George is convinced to come and be their captain.
 McMurphy’s "aunts" (prostitutes) are late in picking the men up
for the fishing trip. Turns out to be just one of them, and she’s
younger than anybody expected and in a small car to boot.
 The girl comes inside and all the men gather around her. She
stops to look at them and begins to squirm under the constant
gaze.
 Billy Bibbit whistles, letting her know how good she looks.
 Big Nurse comes out to let McMurphy know that he can’t take
all ten men in that tiny car. She thinks he’ll need to cancel the
 trip, but McMurphy says he’s already paid the boat man
seventy dollars.
 Doctor Spivey comes in and just starts to stare at the girl.
McMurphy figures it out real quick and convinces the doctor to
come alone and bring his car.
 And they’re off.
 Finally outside, everybody becomes nervous. McMurphy tries to
make the men lighthearted by telling jokes.
 At the gas station, the attendants realize that they’re from the
hospital and try to manipulate them into buying more
expensive gas and other items that they don’t need. But
McMurphy saves the day. Not only do they want regular gas, but
they’re entitled to a discount since it’s a government-sponsored
expedition. He tells the guys at the gas station that they’re hot
off the criminal insane asylumward and they’d better watch out.
See that Indian back there?
 Chief stands up so they can see his size.
 They end up completely intimidating the gas station attendants.
 Harding suddenly realizes that mental illness contains a sort of
power. The more insane a man becomes, the more powerful he
can be. Like Hitler.
 Chief sips a beer and feels good.
 Chief muses in retrospect that the patients thought that
McMurphy had taught them to be courageous and use it. Really,
though, with McMurphy, the men were just pretending to be
brave, not really being brave.
 McMurphy knows that the men's tough looks are all show.
 On the Outside, Chief sees all that the Combine had been able
to accomplish during the years he’s been inside the ward.
 The group runs into a problem at the dock. The captain who
was supposed to take them out said he needed a signed waiver
clearing him with the authorities.
 So McMurphy and the captain go to the phone to make a phone
call and clear the situation up.
 The dock workers by the boat on the dock start to tease the
cute prostitute, asking her why she’d been put in the asylum.
Then another jokes that she wasn’t committed to the asylum,
she’s part of the cure.
 The girl looks at the Acutes, wondering why they don’t defend
her, but all their bravery walked away with McMurphy (who’s
busy on the phone).
 McMurphy comes back saying it’s all set. Captain Block is still
on the phone but they can get ready and then go as soon as he
comes out.
 And they shove off. The doctor is nervous and says, "Shouldn’t
we wait for the captain to come out?" McMurphy replies that if
they wait, the captain will come out and tell them that the
number McMurphy gave him is just a flophouse in Portland—not
the number for the asylum.
 As they take off, the captain comes crashing down the dock
toward them.
 McMurphy and Candy, the prostitute, go off to the cabin to be
alone, leaving George as captain and Harding as second-in-
command.
 At first everybody is excited about stealing the boat, but then
they become really quiet.
 Sefelt gets a bite on his fishing line, but Billy catches the first
fish. Then Chief catches a huge fish that’s as big as a fence
post.
 Candy tries to fish and ends up flashing everybody because,
although she has Billy’s jacket on, she doesn’t have her t-shirt
on anymore. There’s so much commotion that George takes his
eye off where he’s going and runs right into a log, which stops
the engine.
 McMurphy just laughs at the whole scene. Chief decides that
McMurphy knows that you have to just laugh at the things that
hurt you.
 Then everybody starts laughing—all the men and the doctor
and Candy and even Chief.
 Despite joining in on the laughter, Chief feels like he’s not
completely a part of the group. He’s somehow watching the
situation from a distance.
 They keep fishing and start cleaning fish (meaning chopping the
fish up and getting rid of the head and guts and stuff). The
doctor catches a 200- to 300-pound fish. They have so much
extra weight in the boat now that it creaks and pitches all the
way back to shore.
 They’re three life-jackets short and Billy, Harding, and George
volunteer to be the life-jacketless ones.
 They sail through some pretty serious waters to reach shore,
only to face the captain they ditched and a bunch of cops.
 The doctor faces them and says that because they’re a legal,
government-sponsored institution, they have to take it up with
the proper authorities. Furthermore, if the captain really wants
to make a case, he’ll have to explain why they were short three
lifejackets on the boat.
 So the cops leave and then McMurphy and the captain get into
a shoving match. Once their spat is out of the way, the two of
them go get more beer.
 The men are just waiting for the dockhands to say something
about Candy again, but Chief says that the dockhands sensed
they’re not the same scared men who sailed out of here earlier
in the day. All the dockhands say is that Chief’s fish is the
biggest halibut they’ve ever seen.
 Candy cuddles up to Billy on the way back to the asylum and he
says he’d like to take her out on a date. She says she’s free to
come visit in two weeks. When Billy asks McMurphy what time
she should come, he says two o’clock in the morning on
Saturday. They’ll get some of the aides to let her in so she can
visit Billy.
 When the men arrive back on the ward, the Acutes who hadn’t
gone are curious about the trip.
 Harding says McMurphy is exhausted because of what went on
in the cabin below deck (with the girl).
 Chief thinks McMurphy’s tired for other reasons. McMurphy had
insisted on driving past his childhood home, and after that,
Chief had noticed that McMurphy seemed exhausted. As they
were leaving, they saw a yellow rag tied to a tree in the back of
the house. McMurphy said that the first girl he ever slept
with wore that dress. He was about ten years old (!) and she
was younger. He thought they should announce it in some way.
He thought it was like they were married because they’d slept
together. She gave him her dress and said he could have it and
she would go home in her only her underwear as an
announcement. So he threw the dress out the window that
night but the wind caught it and tied it around the tree. And it’s
still there.
 McMurphy says that little girl is the one who turned him into a
"dedicated lover." Then he’s quiet.

PART IV, CHAPTER 1

 Big Nurse has figured out how she can make all the men
suspicious of McMurphy. All she has to do is ask them why he’s
doing so much for them? What’s in it for him?
 So she posts the patients’ financial doings over the past few
months. It shows a drain of finances from all the Acutes except
one—McMurphy.
 The Acutes start joking with him about it and he brags that if he
stays for a year, he’ll have enough money to retire to Florida
the rest of his life.
 And so they do start to get suspicious.
 After they’d been wondering for about a week, Big Nurse brings
it up in the afternoon meeting. She makes sure McMurphy isn’t
at that meeting.
 Nurse Ratched starts the meeting by saying she thinks the men
would like to discuss Mr. Randle Patrick McMurphy without him
there.
 They start by telling funny stories about him. Then they start
asking why he is the way he is— what makes him tick?
 Nurse Ratched finally claims that the men are saying that
McMurphy is crazy like a fox.
 Billy Bibbit takes offense on McMurphy’s behalf.
 Somebody explains that Nurse Ratched simply meant that
McMurphy is nobody’s fool. Nurse Ratched adds that McMurphy
isn’t one to do something for somebody unless he’s getting
something out of it.
 Then she tries to show how much money everybody’s lost to
him because of gambling. He also benefited from the fishing
trip, too, without spending a dime. Quite like a fox, she says.
 Nurse Ratched stops Billy from complaining by saying she’s not
criticizing the behavior. Then she moves on to another topic.
 Later that day, a few of the Acutes (with Chief listening in) are
standing around discussing the meeting, saying that Mack
(McMurphy) really is still a good guy.
 Harding jumps in and says that they’re protesting too much. He
says that Nurse Ratched is clearly right because McMurphy has
made a lot of money off of them from gambling, but they’ve all
enjoyed the games. Why be dishonest about his motives?
 Billy argues that when McMurphy taught him to dance, it wasn’t
motivated by economic factors.
 But then the other men remind Billy about how McMurphy made
him send Candy twenty dollars to come down, even though it
didn’t cost that much for gas. In other words, McMurphy was
taking a cut. McMurphy also wanted Candy to bring him some
liquor when she came.
 Chief still thinks McMurphy is a giant that came out of the sky
to save them all. He also appreciates the confidence that
McMurphy instills in him. McMurphy even told Chief that he’s
grow ten inches since the fishing trip.
 McMurphy and Chief practice removing the tub room’s control
panel—the one that McMurphy was unable to move himself.
McMurphy again warns Chief not to tell anyone.
 When McMurphy cons everybody into trying to lift the control
panel again later, Chief thinks McMurphy might tell everybody
how he’s helping Chief get his size back. Chief thinks that would
prove McMurphy isn’t doing everything for the money. But
McMurphy doesn’t say a thing.
 McMurphy does arrange a bet that no man can lift the panel.
Chief keeps hoping McMurphy isn’t going to use him to make
money, but sure enough, after the meeting is over, he takes
Chief into the room and show everybody that he can lift the
panel. So McMurphy cons everybody out of their money.
 When McMurphy tries to give Chief five dollars, Chief refuses to
take it.
 McMurphy begins to get the hint and he asks Chief to explain
why everybody’s giving him the cold shoulder.
 Chief tries to explain but all he gets out is that it isn’t supposed
to be about winning things. McMurphy doesn’t understand him
at all.
 Chief thinks what happens in the shower room that afternoon is
his fault.
 The orderlies arrive, gathering Chief and others who went on
the fishing trip for a special shower. Big Nurse said that because
they’d been with a prostitute, they needed special cleaning so
as not to contaminate the entire ward. Their pubic areas and
rear ends are cleaned with a special gunky kind of salve (ew).
 Everybody is joking and Frederickson actually farts when the
orderly tries to clean him. But then they reach George. And
that’s when the men realize why they’ve been wrong about
McMurphy.
 George never uses soap when he showers and he also never
uses a towel that somebody hands to him. He had a thing about
dirt. Everybody knows this, but everybody also knows that the
orderly won’t pass up his chance.
 George says no, none of the salve. The orderly pretends to
wheedle, explaining that George might have bugs on him.
 George insists he doesn’t have bugs.
 The orderly continues to wheedle.
 McMurphy tells the orderly to lay off.
 The orderly continues to hassle George and then attack George
with salve.
 McMurphy wades right into the middle of it, telling the orderly
to stop. As if he’s desperate to turn the orderly’s attention away
from George, he calls the orderly a "coon" and a "nigger."
 The orderly turns back to George. McMurphy shoves the orderly
away from George and asks him again, with a quiet pleading
tone, to stop messing with George.
 The orderly says, "McMurphy, you forcing me to protect myself."
Then he swings a punch right at McMurphy’s cheek.
 It turns into a full-blown fight, with McMurphy quickly gaining
the upper-hand. He’s beating the orderly up, who starts to curse
the other two orderlies since they aren’t helping him out. So the
other orderlies jump in to help him out.
 Then Chief joins in the fistfight.
 By the time Nurse Ratched and the other staff members arrive,
the fight is over. McMurphy and Chief have won, and all of the
men are congratulating them.
 They’re still congratulating McMurphy and Chief when Big Nurse
puts restraints on their wrists and takes them up to the
Disturbed Ward.

PART IV, CHAPTER 2

 When they get to Disturbed Ward, McMurphy is aiming to be top
dog. He begins by asking who is the person who runs the poker
game on this ward.
 Then he tells the patients that he and Chief busted up some
"greasemonkeys" downstairs and that’s why they’re here.
 Chief’s now in pain from having fallen in the shower during the
fight. He doesn’t show it, though.
 A nurse unlocks their cuffs, gives McMurphy a cigarette and
Chief some gum. ("I remember you chewed gum," she says.)
Then she asks about the fight—whom they fought and whether
anybody was hurt.
 The nurse basically apologizes to Chief and McMurphy for the
treatment they’ve gotten in Nurse Ratched’s ward. She calls the
nurses in the regular ward "Army nurses" and says that they’re
 a little sick themselves. She even goes so far as to say that she
thinks unmarried nurses over 35 years old should be fired.
(Nurse Ratched is around 50 years old.)
 McMurphy wants to know how long they’ll be in the Disturbed
Ward. The nurse answers, "Not very long. I’m afraid […] No, you
probably won’t be very long—I mean—like you are now." That’s
a scary bit of foreshadowing implying that something bad is
going to happen.
 In the morning, both Chief and McMurphy are stiff and hurting
from the fight.
 At the Nurses’ Station, a nurse tries to give both of them the
red pills—the knockout pills. They both refuse them and she
says she’ll have to call to find out if that’s OK.
 McMurphy apologizes to Chief that he got him into trouble.
 Big Nurse herself soon arrives, along with a couple of the
orderlies that they fought. One of them has his arm in a sling
and the other has tape on his nose.
 She talks to McMurphy, asking him if he’s ashamed that he had
a tantrum like a big baby.
 Nurse Ratched tells him that at group meeting yesterday, the
patients and nurses together agreed that he should receive
some shock therapy unless he admits his mistakes.
 McMurphy asks if he needs to sign a paper and she says only if
he thinks that’s necessary. He does think that’s necessary, and
that she should also add a few things on the paper, too, while
she’s at it—like how he’s part of a plot to overthrow the
government. Yes siree, he says, the Chinese Commies could
learn a thing or two from you.
 Then he gets up and walks away from her.
 Three aides walk them over to the Main Building. There’s frost
on the ground but Chief feels that frost "in my belly."
 Chief decides he won’t cry or yell with McMurphy there.
 They watch as one group goes in for electrotherapy. They watch
as the group comes out.
 Chief watches as McMurphy is strapped in. McMurphy is trying
to be brave for Chief’s sake. He’s winking at Chief and telling
him not to holler. And then they zap him.
 It’s Chief’s turn next.
 Being shocked takes Chief back to a memory of hunting with his
father. He remembers talking with his father about why they
took his mother’s name, Bromden, because it made being part
of white society easier. He remembers a game he used to play
with his grandmother, a children’s game. Tingle Tingle Tangle
Toes. He remembers seeing his grandmother stone-cold dead.
 He thinks about that children’s rhyme—"one flew east, one flew
west."
 He wonders how they got to him with the machine again.
 He wonders how McMurphy made him big again.
 The orderlies are out there, peeing on him. He knows they’ll
come in and accuse him of soaking all the sheets.
 He stands up slowly. His pillows on the floor of the Seclusion
Room are soaked with pee.
 He tries to clear his mind—it’s the first time he’s ever worked to
bring himself back to consciousness.
 He taps on the window and realizes that this time, he has beat
them.

PART IV, CHAPTER 3

 In the past, Chief would wander around in the fog for days, even
weeks, after getting electroshock therapy. He wouldn’t
remember where he was or who he was.
 McMurphy gets three more shock treatments that week. As
soon as he starts to come around, Miss Ratched (this is the first
time Chief refers to her as Miss Ratched instead of Big Nurse)
comes around and asks him if he is ready to apologize and
admit he was wrong. When McMurphy says no, she sends him
back.
 One time, McMurphy even reaches out and pinches Nurse
Ratched’s butt as she walks away.
 Chief tries to convince him to just say he was wrong and get out
of the treatments. McMurphy laughs and says no way.
 McMurphy insists it doesn’t hurt, but whenever he hears his
name being called for treatment, his face becomes thin, scared,
and taut.
 Chief goes back to the regular ward after a week. There’s a lot
he wants to say to McMurphy before he goes, but McMurphy is
too out of it.
 The Acutes and Chronics all ask Chief to tell them if the stories
they’d heard were true—that they are electroshocking
McMurphy every day but he’s still giving them hell. Chief tells
them what he can and nobody thinks it’s strange that suddenly
he can talk and hear.
 Nurse Ratched brings up McMurphy’s treatment in the group
meeting the next day. She says that electrotherapy isn’t
working and they may need to do something more drastic.
 Harding points out that Nurse Ratched hasn’t gotten to
McMurphy, but from all reports, he has gotten to her.
 Nurse Ratched can see that among the men, McMurphy is
"getting bigger" all the time he’s gone. She decides he needs to
be brought back to her ward so the men can see how
vulnerable he actually is.
 Everybody has figured out that she plans to bring him back only
to really break him, so the men start plotting a way to help him
escape from the asylum.
 The men tell McMurphy of their plan to help him escape, but
McMurphy points out that the day they selected is actually the
day that Candy is going to sneak in to see Billy. McMurphy says
he’s in no hurry and will wait to escape until after Billy’s date.
 Nurse Ratched again brings up McMurphy in the group therapy
meeting. She says that shock therapy isn’t working and maybe
an operation is necessary.
 McMurphy says that an operation really isn’t necessary. Then he
makes an obscene suggestion that if she cuts off one pair of
balls, he has another pair in the nightstand.
 As old as Billy is, he still looks like a kid. And he still acts like a
kid. More importantly, his mother still treats him like he’s a kid.
(As we'll see, Billy's relationship with his mother becomes
important in the next chapter.)
 At midnight, McMurphy discusses with the man on staff, Mr.
Turkle, what’s going to happen—how Candy is coming to visit. It
seems like McMurphy has already told Mr. Turkle about the plan
in the past and is now just reminding him.
 McMurphy, Billy, and others are discussing the plan. They’ll let
Candy in the window and the two lovebirds can go to the
Seclusion Room for privacy.
 Turkle wants something in exchange for his help: some alcohol
and a bit of time with Candy.
 The girl is late and Billy gets more and more nervous, afraid she
might not come. So they agree that maybe she can’t see the
ward because there are no lights on.
 Just as they get the entire ward lit up, there’s a tapping on the
window and there she is.
 There are two girls—Candy and the other girl, Sandy, who
hadn’t shown up to the fishing trip. Sandy has just left her
husband.
 Both women are drunk and Candy says they had to keep asking
for directions at every bar they passed on their way there.
 The group hears a supervisor coming along and they all run to
the bathroom to hide. The supervisor is looking for Mr. Turkle,
who is in the bathroom with everybody else.
 He steps out of the bathroom and the supervisor wants to know
is why all the lights are on. He doesn’t have an explanation.
 McMurphy says somebody needs to go out and help Mr. Turkle,
so Harding flushes the toilet and heads out, zipping up his pants
as if he had just been going to the toilet.
 Together, Harding and Mr. Turkle get rid of the supervisor and
everybody comes back out into the hall.
 They all start passing around wine and vodka bottles that the
girls brought, rapidly getting drunk.
 Now the men want to get into the room where all of the
medications are so they can mix drugs with alcohol. Mr. Turkle
doesn’t have the key to the room, but he lets the men attempt
to pick the lock.
 While McMurphy works on picking the lock, the others go to the
Nurses’ Station to raid the filing cabinets.
 Billy and Candy start going through his file. She can’t believe
he’s "phrenic this and pathic that" because he seems more
normal than all those things.
 McMurphy manages to bust into the drug room and they all
start mixing cough syrup with vodka.
 The men are having a good old time playing tag in the dark
hallways with wheelchairs, but then Sefelt has a seizure. Sandy
is awed by it because she’s never experienced anything even
remotely similar.
 Harding comes and sprinkles pills all over Sandy and Sefelt.
Then he prays to God, saying that he hopes God will accept
these two sinners into their arms, as well as the rest of the
men, because he’s just realized this is the end, it’s their last
fling.
 All of the men realize the seriousness of their escapade when
Harding says that "Miss Ratched shall line us all against the
wall, where we’ll face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading
shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines!
Libriums! Stelazines! [Those are all medications.] And with a
wave of her sword, blooie!Tranquilize all of us completely out of
existence."
 Billy Bibbit and Candy go to the Seclusion Room.
 Chief suddenly realizes he’s drunk and it makes him realize that
maybe the Combine isn’t all-powerful. The men are basically
having a party in the Combine’s stronghold, so the men
themselves must be powerful.
 For the first time in ages, Chief feels good.
 Most of the men now go to bed, leaving Chief, Mr. Turkle,
McMurphy, Harding, and Sandy to talk about how to clean up
the ward and whether there will be repercussions.
 Harding says McMurphy is too far gone to realize the
seriousness of the situation.
 Harding comes up with a plan to make it look like Turkle was
tied up by McMurphy and then McMurphy had broken into the
drug room and then escaped from the ward.
 McMurphy says it’s too much like TV.
 So then McMurphy asks Harding and Chief if they want to leave
right now and escape with him.
 Harding says he’s not ready to leave yet.
 Chief says somebody should stick around the ward for a few
weeks after McMurphy goes just to make sure everything
doesn’t slide right back to the way Nurse Ratched wants it.
 McMurphy says that after he escapes, Harding can be big goose
loony again. But he doesn’t know what Chief can be.
 They all go back to bed, and Sandy joins McMurphy in bed.
Turkle is supposed to wake McMurphy up in one hour.
 McMurphy and Sandy curl up and fall asleep. And that’s how
the orderlies find them when they come in at 6:30 to wake
everybody up.
 PART IV, CHAPTER 4
 Chief narrates that, reflecting back on what happened next,
he’s sure it was inevitable. Even if Mr. Turkle had woken up
McMurphy and Sandy when he was supposed to, the final
outcome would still have been the same.
 Rumors spread like crazy around the ward when people begin to
wake up. The patients who had been in on the action start
telling the story with a kind of quiet pride that slowly becomes
more boisterous.
 Everybody’s herded into the day room, still in their pajamas,
except for McMurphy and Sandy, who look kind of dreamy and
satisfied.
 When the nurse calls to report Mr. Turkle’s resignation, Mr.
Turkle and Sandy crawl out the window and leave. Everybody is
still too drunk to do what they should do, which is lock the
window after them.
 One of the orderlies finds the unlocked window. He locks it, then
goes to get the role calling sheet. Then he discovers that Billy
Bibbit is missing.
 That starts a storm of laughter as everybody remembers where
Billy Bibbit is and why. So the orderly goes in to tell the nurse
that Billy is missing.
 Nurse Ratched comes back out and demands to know what’s
going on and where Billy is. Nobody speaks.
 So she goes searching and soon finds Billy and Candy in the
Seclusion Room. She’s appalled and asks him how he could do
this with such a cheap girl. And most of all, she’s worried about
how Billy’s poor mother will take the news.
 That’s what gets to Billy. His mother. Billy stammers that Nurse
Ratched doesn’t need to tell his mother, but Nurse Ratched
reminds Billy that she and his mom are good friends.
 Everybody stops laughing as they see Billy panic and begin to
beg Nurse Ratched not to tell his mother. Freaking out, Billy
tires to claim that the other men MADE him do it—they forced
him.
 Nurse Ratched leads him away, murmuring, "Poor boy, poor
boy."
 A lot of phone calls are made and when the doctor shows up,
you can tell he already knows what the story is, and that Nurse
Ratched blames Billy. But, she repeats the story for his benefit.
 Nurse Ratched suggests that the doctor help Billy, who has
been through a lot and is in a terrible state. The doctor follows
her directions.

 Scanlon tells McMurphy that they don’t blame him, they know
where the blame lies. Chief reiterates the idea.
 McMurphy relaxes and closes his eyes.
 Then the doctor starts yelling and Nurse Ratched goes running.
When she returns, she informs McMurphy that Billy has just cut
his throat. She hopes he’s satisfied, she says, playing with lives.
First Charles Cheswick (who drowned himself) and now poor
William Bibbit.
 Slowly, McMurphy stands up and then he smashes through the
glass door.
 Nurse Ratched is terrified and screaming. She screams when
McMurphy rips her uniform down the front, exposing her chest.
All of the men see how big her breasts are as they swell out of
her uniform.
 Finally, the staff pries McMurphy off of Ratched’s neck and he
cries, falling backward. It’s the sound of an animal trapped, but
one who doesn’t care anymore if he dies.
 In the upcoming weeks, things at the ward change.
 Sefelt and Frederickson sign out of the ward Against Medical
Advice. Afterwards, three more men leave. Another six are
transferred to another ward.
 The asylum tries to push the doctor to resign, but he resists,
saying they’ll have to investigate the situation and fire him if
they want him to leave.
 Big Nurse is in the hospital for a week and, with her gone, a lot
of the guys are able to change some of the ward’s policies.
 When Nurse Ratched comes back, they all run out to meet her,
to ask about McMurphy. She jumps back when they approach
and it’s clear that she’s still freaked out. It’s also clear that she
can no longer hide the fact that she’s a woman. All of the men
have seen her breasts and aren’t about to forget it.
 Because she can’t talk yet (after being choked by McMurphy),
she writes that McMurphy will be back.
 Harding rips up her note and tells her she is full of bull.
 She tries to get the ward back under her control, but
McMurphy’s memory is too strong. She’s losing her power and
losing her patients.
 Chief doesn’t want to leave the ward until he knows for sure
that McMurphy will be back.
 Three weeks later, McMurphy does come back. Post-operative.
He was given a lobotomy. They push him inside on a gurney
and leave him near the Vegetables.
 The Acutes discuss that they can’t be fooled—this isn’t
McMurphy. Sure looks an awful lot like him, though. But it can’t
be him!
 As the afternoon wears on, the swelling on McMurphy’s face
starts to go down, so everyone has to admit that it’s really him
after all.
 That night, Chief waits until everybody is asleep and then he
goes over to McMurphy.
 He takes a pillow and he smothers McMurphy to death, even
though McMurphy’s body fights for life.
 Scanlon whispers to Chief to take it easy. And then he wants to
know if it’s finished. Chief says yes.
 Scanlon says that Nurse Ratched will know that McMurphy was
killed, so Chief had better get out of the ward while he still can.
 Chief makes fun of the idea of leaving, because he can’t just
ask to be let out of the ward. But Scanlon reminds him that
McMurphy showed him how to escape a few weeks back.
 So Chief goes into the tub-room and lifts the control panel. He
heaves it through the window.
 And then he runs for it.
 He catches a ride with a Mexican fellow going north and makes
up a story about being a professional Indian wrestler that the
syndicate had tried to lock up in a nuthouse. The guy gives him
a jacket to cover his green uniform and gives Chief ten bucks to
use for food while he hitchhikes to Canada.
 But Chief thinks he’ll stop at Columbia (the town he grew up in)
on the way. He wants to see if any of the guys he used to know
in the village are still around and not too drunk. He wants to see
the country near the gorge again.
 Mostly, he just wants to clear his mind. He’s been away—stuck
in the asylum—for a long time.