Chief Bromden is the son of the chief of the Columbia Indians and a white woman. He suffers from paranoia and hallucinations, has received multiple electroshock treatments, and has been in the hospital for ten years, longer than any other patient in the ward. Bromden sees modern society as a huge, oppressive conglomeration that he calls the Combine and the hospital as a place meant to fix people who do not conform.
Bromden chronicles the story of the mental ward while developing his perceptual abilities and regaining a sense of himself as an individual. Randle McMurphy is a big, redheaded gambler, a con man, and a backroom boxer.
His body is heavily scarred and tattooed, and he has a fresh scar across the bridge of his nose. McMurphy serves as the unlikely Christ figure in the novel—the dominant force challenging the establishment and the ultimate savior of the victimized patients. The head of the hospital ward. She rules her ward with an iron hand and masks her humanity and femininity behind a stiff, patronizing facade. She selects her staff for their submissiveness, and she weakens her patients through a psychologically manipulative program designed to destroy their self-esteem.
Harding helps McMurphy understand the realities of the hospital. Although he is married, Harding is a homosexual. He has difficulty dealing with the overwhelming social prejudice against homosexuals, so he hides in the hospital voluntarily. A shy patient. Billy has a bad stutter and seems much younger than his thirty-one years. Billy is voluntarily in the hospital, as he is afraid of the outside world. A mild-mannered doctor who may be addicted to opiates. Nurse Ratched chose Doctor Spivey as the doctor for her ward because he is as easily cowed and dominated as the patients.
Cheswick, a man of much talk and little action, drowns in the pool—possibly a suicide—after McMurphy does not support Cheswick when Cheswick takes a stand against Nurse Ratched. Hospital aides. Nurse Ratched hired them because they are filled with hatred and will submit to her wishes completely.
A beautiful, carefree prostitute from Portland. Candy Starr accompanies McMurphy and the other patients on the fishing trip, and then comes to the ward for a late-night party that McMurphy arranges. A hospital patient, a big Swede, and a former seaman. McMurphy recruits George Sorenson to be captain for the fishing excursion. A hospital patient who suffered brain damage when he was born. Pete Bancini continually declares that he is tired, and at one point he tells the other patients that he was born dead.
A dishonorable discharge, afterward, for insubordination. Followed by a history of street brawls and barroom fights and a series of arrests for Drunkenness, Assault and Battery, Disturbing the Peace, repeated gambling, and one arrest — for Rape. It is perhaps part of McMurphy's innate nature that he does not adhere to social strictures. It is also reasonable to assert that his imprisonment during the Korean conflict deeply impacted his distrust of authority. The fact that he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for leading an escape serves as a foreshadowing of events later in the novel, but could also serve to create a more complete understanding of his character's motivations.
Although not foreign to hard physical labor, McMurphy chafes at his assignment to a prison work farm and looks forward to his confinement to a mental hospital as a pleasant way to spend the rest of his sentence for brawling. The violence of fighting is as natural an activity for men in a natural state as is the desire for sexual relations. McMurphy's run-ins with the law for statutory rape he declares preposterous, as his fifteen-year-old female "victim" lied about her age and initiated the sexual interlude.
Upon his arrival at the hospital, McMurphy encounters Dale Harding, identified as the "bull-goose loony. Harding's abstract arguments in defense of Ratched are easily defeated by McMurphy's empirical observations of her manipulations of the men in the ward.
McMurphy observes that Ratched's tactics are intended more to ensure her authority than benefit the patients, and that the most glaring example of this tactic is using the men to spy and report on each other. The other men realize that McMurphy is correct, and begin to dedicate their admiration and allegiance to him. Mantleray Justin Theroux that so far, four such tragedies have taken place. Come episode 9, we finally learn what, exactly, a McMurphy entails.
Beware: When you submit your mind to the whims of a super-computer with an excess of emotion and severe rationality deficiency, you run the risk of a McMurphy.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest begins when McMurphy is transferred from prison to an Oregon mental institution for his belligerent and insubordinate behavior while at a work farm. McMurphy, essentially, feigned insanity so he could avoid carrying out his sentence in the penitentiary and retreat to what he presumed were the asylum's more lax conditions.
McMurphy presumed wrong. While at the hospital, McMurphy encounters his mortal foe, Nurse Ratched played by Louise Fletcher in the movie , the strict and power-hungry yin to McMurphy's anti-establishment yang.
Need proof of Ratched's inherent awfulness? McMurphy and Ratched spend the movie locked in a battle for power, both set on swaying the inmates to follow their lead. Eventually, at the movie's climax, Ratched deals with her McMurphy problem by lobotomizing him, a once common but destructive medical practice in which part of the patient's brain is removed JFK's sister, Rosemary, was lobotomized. McMurphy is rendered a vegetable, just like the characters who are McMurphy'ed in Maniac.
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