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One flew over the cuckoo's nest samenvatting + literaire kenmerken
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In this document you will find a summary and a number of elaborate literary features of the book One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
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Chief Bromden, a long-term patient in Nurse Ratched’s psychiatric ward, narrates the eventsof the novel. The book begins as he awakens to a typical day on the ward, feeling paranoid
about the illicit nighttime activities of the ward’s three black aides. The aides mock him for
being a pushover, even though he is six feet seven inches tall, and they make him sweep
the hallways for them, nicknaming him “Chief Broom.” Bromden is half Indian and pretends
to be deaf and dumb; as a result, he overhears all the secrets on the ward and is barely
noticed by anyone despite his stature.
Nurse Ratched, whom Bromden refers to as “the Big Nurse,” enters the ward with a gust of
cold air. Bromden describes Ratched as having “skin like flesh-colored enamel” and lips and
fingertips the strange orange color of polished steel. Her one feminine feature is her
oversized bosom, which she tries to conceal beneath a starched white uniform. When she
gets angry with the aides, Bromden sees her get “big as a tractor.” She orders the aides to
shave Bromden, and he begins to scream and hallucinate that he is being surrounded by
machine-made fog until he is forcedly medicated. He tells us that his forthcoming story about
the hospital might seem “too awful to be the truth.”
Bromden regains consciousness in the day room. Here, he tells us that a public relations
man sometimes leads tours around the ward, pointing out the cheery atmosphere and
claiming that the ward is run without the brutality exercised in previous generations. Today,
the ward’s monotony is interrupted when Randle McMurphy, a new patient, arrives.
McMurphy’s appearance is preceded by his boisterous, brassy voice and his confident, iron-
heeled walk. McMurphy laughs when the patients are stunned silent by his entrance. It is the
first real laugh that the ward has heard in years.
McMurphy, a large redhead with a devilish grin, swaggers around the ward in his motorcycle
cap and dirty work-farm clothes, with a leather jacket over one arm. He introduces himself as
a gambling fool, saying that he requested to be transferred to the hospital to escape the
drudgery of the Pendleton Work Farm. He asks to meet the “bull goose loony” so he can
take over as the man in charge. He encounters Billy Bibbit, a thirty-one-year-old baby-faced
man with a severe stutter, and Dale Harding, the effeminate and educated president of the
,Patients’ Council. All the while, McMurphy sidesteps the attempts of the daytime aides to
herd him into the admission routine of a shower, an injection, and a rectal thermometer.
McMurphy surveys the day room. The patients are divided into two main categories: the
Acutes, who are considered curable, and the Chronics, whom Bromden, himself a Chronic,
calls “machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired.” The Chronics who can move around
are Walkers, and the rest are either Wheelers or Vegetables. Some Chronics are patients
who arrived at the hospital as Acutes but were mentally crippled by excessive shock
treatment or brain surgery, common practices in the hospital. Nurse Ratched encourages the
Acutes to spy on one another. If one reveals an embarrassing or incriminating personal
detail, the rest race to write it in the logbook. Their reward for such disclosures is sleeping
late the next morning.
Nurse Ratched runs her ward on a strict schedule, controlling every movement with absolute
precision. The nurse has selected her aides for their inherent cruelty and her staff for their
submissiveness. Bromden recalls Maxwell Taber, a patient who demanded information
about his medications. He was sent for multiple electroshock treatments and rendered
completely docile. Eventually, he was considered cured and was discharged. Bromden
conceives of society as a huge, oppressive conglomeration that he calls the Combine, and
he sees the hospital as a factory for “fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in
the schools and in the churches.”
During the Group Meeting, Nurse Ratched reopens the topic of Harding’s difficult
relationship with his wife. When McMurphy makes lewd jokes at the nurse’s expense, she
retaliates by reading his file aloud, focusing on his arrest for statutory rape. McMurphy
regales the group with stories about the sexual appetite of his fifteen-year-old lover. Even
Doctor Spivey enjoys McMurphy’s humorous rebellion against Ratched. The doctor reads
from the file, “Don’t overlook the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis to
escape the drudgery of the work farm,” to which McMurphy responds, “Doctor, do I look like
a sane man?” McMurphy has similar defiant retorts for almost any action Ratched can
consider, which perturbs Ratched greatly. McMurphy is disconcerted that the patients and
, the doctor can smile but not laugh. Bromden remembers a meeting that was broken up when
Pete Bancini, a lifelong Chronic who constantly declared he was tired, became lucid for a
moment and hit one of the aides. The nurse injected him with a sedative as he had a
nervous breakdown.
During the meeting, the patients tear into Harding’s sexual problems. Afterward, they are
embarrassed, as always, at their viciousness. As a new participant and observer, McMurphy
tells Harding that the meeting was a “pecking party”—the men acted like a bunch of chickens
pecking at another chicken’s wound. He warns them that a pecking party can wipe out the
whole flock. When McMurphy points out that Nurse Ratched pecks first, Harding becomes
defensive and states that Ratched’s procedure is therapeutic. McMurphy replies that she is
merely a “ball-cutter.”
Harding finally agrees that Ratched is a cruel, vicious woman. He explains that everyone in
the ward is a rabbit in a world ruled by wolves. They are in the hospital because they are
unable to accept their roles as rabbits. Nurse Ratched is one of the wolves, and she is there
to train them to accept their rabbit roles. She can make a patient shrink with shame and fear
while acting like a concerned angel of mercy. Ratched never accuses directly, but she rules
others through insinuation. McMurphy says that they should tell her to go to hell with her
insinuating questions. Harding warns that such hostile behavior will earn a man electroshock
therapy and a stay in the Disturbed ward. He points to Bromden, calling him “a six-foot-eight
sweeping machine” as a result of all the shock treatment he has received. Harding asserts
that the only power men have over women is sexual violence, but they cannot even exercise
that power against the icy, impregnable nurse. McMurphy makes a bet with the other
patients that he can make Nurse Ratched lose her temper within a week. He explains that he
conned his way out of the work farm by feigning insanity, and Nurse Ratched is unprepared
for an enemy with a “trigger-quick mind” like his. Immediately upon his arrival, McMurphy
challenges the ward with his exuberant vitality and sexuality, which are directly opposed to
the sterile, mechanical nature of the hospital and modern society. He is set up as an obvious
foil to Nurse Ratched, as well as to the silent and repressed Bromden. McMurphy’s
discussion with Harding reveals the misogynistic undertones of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
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