One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Summary
Chief Bromden, a long-term patient in Nurse Ratched’s psychiatric ward, narrates the
events of the novel. The book begins as he awakens to a typical day on the ward, feel-
ing 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 se-
crets 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 rela-
tions man sometimes leads tours around the ward, pointing out the cheery atmos-
phere 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 mo-
torcycle cap and dirty work-farm clothes, with a leather jacket over one arm. He intro-
duces 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 ef-
feminate 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 embar-
rassing 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 de-
manded 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.
Bromden believes that Nurse Ratched can set the clock to any speed. Sometimes
everything is painfully fast and sometimes painfully slow. His only escape is being in
the fog where time does not exist. He notes that whoever controls the fog machine
has not turned it on as much since McMurphy’s arrival. Later, Bromden explains his
captivation with McMurphy’s con-artistry, which he displays while playing cards with
the other patients. McMurphy wins hundreds of cigarettes and then allows his
opponents to win them back. That night, McMurphy whispers to Bromden and implies
that he knows he is not really deaf. Bromden does not take his night medication and
has a nightmare that the hospital is a mechanical slaughterhouse. The staff hangs Old
Blastic on a meat hook and slashes him open, and ash and rust pour out of the wound.
Mr. Turkle wakes him from the nightmare.
Everyone wakes to McMurphy’s boisterous singing in the latrine. When Williams, one
of the aides, will not let him have toothpaste before the appointed time, McMurphy
brushes his teeth with soap. Bromden hides his smile, as he is reminded of how his
, father also used to win confrontations with humor. Ratched prepares to reprimand
McMurphy for his singing, but he stops her cold by stepping out of the bathroom
wearing only a towel. He says that someone has taken his clothes, so he has nothing
to wear. Ratched furiously reprimands the aides for failing to issue a patient’s outfit to
McMurphy. When Washington, another aide, offers McMurphy an outfit, McMurphy
removes the towel, revealing that all along he was wearing a pair of boxer shorts—
black satin covered with white whales. Ratched manages to regain her composure
with serious effort.
McMurphy is even more confident that morning. He asks Ratched to turn down the
recorded music playing in the ward. She politely refuses, explaining that some of the
Chronics are hard of hearing and cannot entertain themselves without the music
turned up loudly. She also refuses to allow them to play cards in another room, citing
a lack of staff to supervise two rooms. Doctor Spivey comes to get McMurphy for an
interview, and they return talking and laughing together. At the Group Meeting, the
doctor announces McMurphy’s plan for the radio to be played at a higher volume, so
that the hard-of-hearing patients can enjoy it more. He proposes that the other
patients go to another room to read or play cards. Since the Chronics are easy to
supervise, the staff can be split between the rooms. Ratched restrains herself from
losing her temper.
McMurphy starts a Monopoly game with Cheswick, Martini, and Harding that goes on
for three days. McMurphy makes sure he does not lose his temper with any of the
staff. Once, he does get angry with the patients for being “too chicken-shit.” He then
requests that Ratched allow them to watch the World Series, even though it is not the
regulation TV time. In order to make up for this, he proposes that they do the cleaning
chores at night and watch the TV in the afternoon, but Ratched refuses to change the
schedule. He proposes a vote at the Group Meeting, but only Cheswick is brave
enough—or crazy enough—to defy Ratched, since the others are afraid of long-term
repercussions. McMurphy, furious, says he is going to escape, and Fredrickson goads
him into showing them how he would do it. McMurphy bets them that he can lift the
cement control panel in the tub room and use it to break through the reinforced
windows. Everybody knows it will be impossible to lift the massive panel, but he
makes such a sincere effort that for one moment they all believe it is possible.
Bromden remembers how at the old hospital they did not have pictures on the wall or
television. He recalls Public Relations saying, “A man that would want to run away
from a place as nice as this, why, there’d be something wrong with him.” Bromden
senses that the fog machine has been turned on again. He explains how the fog
makes him feel safe and that McMurphy keeps trying to drag them out of the fog
where they will be “easy to get at.” He then overhears someone talking about Old
Rawler, a patient in the Disturbed unit who killed himself by cutting off his testicles.
Bromden then further describes getting lost in the fog and finding himself two or three
times a month at the electroshock room.
At the next Group Meeting, Bromden feels immersed in fog and cannot follow the
group as they grill Billy about his stutter and failed relationship with a girl. McMurphy
proposes another vote regarding the TV, with the support of some of the other
patients. It is the first day of the World Series. Bromden observes the hands go up as
McMurphy drags all twenty Acutes out of the fog. Ratched declares the proposal
defeated, however, because none of the twenty Chronics raised their hands and
McMurphy needs a majority. McMurphy finally persuades Bromden to raise his hand,
but Ratched says the vote is closed. During the afternoon cleaning chores, McMurphy
declares that it is time for the game. When he turns on the TV, Ratched cuts its power,
but McMurphy does not budge from the armchair. The Acutes follow suit and sit in
front of the blank TV. She screams and rants at them for breaking the schedule, and
McMurphy wins his bet that he could make her lose her composure.
