648 Kesey, Ken
a small part of a much larger organization called
“The Combine” that is trying to make everyone and
everything in American society the same: “like, for
example—a train . . . laying a string of full-grown
men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying
them like a hatch of identical insects.”
As the story progresses we learn that the Chief ’s
conflicted sense of identity is due not only to being
undermined by those in authority but also to an
internal crisis concerning his mixed race ethnicity.
As a half-white, half-Native American, the Chief
seems torn between two ways of being. Unable to
find an identity that he feels comfortable with, the
Chief instead acts as he thinks others expect him to:
“I was just being the way I looked, the way people
wanted. It don’t seem like I ever have been me.” The
Chief ’s identity crisis also represents a larger issue
concerning the destruction of American Indian
identity. We are told that the removal of the Chief ’s
father from his land was partially instigated by
his white mother who became the dominant force
in the relationship. This led the Chief to take his
mother’s surname instead of his father’s, an act that
is symptomatic of white assimilation of indigenous
cultures.
The other patients, oppressed by Big Nurse,
share the Chief ’s confused sense of identity. Nurse
Ratched controls the patients, instilling in them a
belief that they are abnormal and need to adjust
in order to fit into “normal” society, as one of the
patients sarcastically states “Not talk me into it, no.
I was born a rabbit. Just look at me. I simply need
the nurse to make me happy with my role.” Harding,
in particular, is important here, the novel implying
that he is a closet homosexual unable to declare
his homosexuality for fear of ridicule by the wider
society.
While Big Nurse manipulates any sense of iden-
tity the other patients have, she is largely unable
to control McMurphy in a similar manner. The
appearance of McMurphy is markedly different
from our introduction to the Chief. While Chief
Bromden is presented as a repressed and downtrod-
den character, McMurphy’s individuality lends him
a strength of personality and belief in himself that
the other patients initially lack. The Chief says that
McMurphy “sounds like he’s way above them, talk-
ing down, like he’s sailing fifty yards overhead, hol-
lering at those below on the ground. He sounds big”
and suggests that he is this way because “He hadn’t
let what he looked like run his life one way or the
other, any more than he’d let the Combine mill him
into fitting where they wanted him to fit.”
In opposition to the harmful practices of Big
Nurse, McMurphy tries to restore the other patients’
confidence, turning them from “rabbits” back into
men. He does this by encouraging the men to
believe in their own self-worth and by teaching
them that it is Nurse Ratched who is in the wrong.
McMurphy’s independent actions and the positive
effects they have on the other patients suggest that
a strong sense of “who we are” is important to our
personal well–being. Indeed, the novel ends with
two events that demonstrate this belief. First, the
Chief smothers the lobotomized McMurphy in
order to prevent Big Nurse from using McMurphy
as a tool to control future patients, and, second, the
newly restored Chief is able to escape from the men-
tal institution by hurling a cast-iron control panel
through a window. Both actions represent a desire
to state the importance of the individual maintain-
ing control over his or her own identity in the face
of society’s attempts to change it. As the Chief notes
at the end of the novel “I been away a long time.”
David SimmonsoppreSSion in One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest
Reflecting the anti-authoritarian ethos of the 1960s,
the novel suggests that society tries to control our
actions through oppressive practices. In the book we
are presented with numerous examples of those with
power attempting to tell characters with less power
how to behave. Most obviously this occurs through
the characters of Big Nurse and her orderlies, who
are effectively employed with the sole purpose of
controlling the patients. While the structure of the
hospital system means that the staff must tell those
under their care what to do, the novel suggests that
Nurse Ratched goes beyond mere supervision and
instead seeks to rule over all elements of the patients’
lives.
At the start of the novel we are introduced to the
narrator, Chief Bromden, as the hospital orderlies