One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

Don’t you have a straight deck around here? Well say, here we go, I brought along my own deck, just in case, has something in it other than face cards—and check the pictures, huh? Ever one different. Fifty-two positions.” Cheswick is pop-eyed already, and what he sees on those cards don’t help his condition. “Easy now, don’t smudge ’em; we got lots of time, lots of games ahead of us. I like to use my deck here because it takes at least a week for the other players to get to where they can even see the suit. . . .”

What the Chronics are—or most of us—are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

He has been heard to say, ‘My dear sweet but illiterate wife thinks any word or gesture that does not smack of brickyard brawn and brutality is a word or gesture of weak dandyism.’”

I’m disappointed in you, my friend, oh, very disappointed. I had judged from our encounter this morning that you were more intelligent—an illiterate clod, perhaps, certainly a backwoods braggart with no more sensitivity than a goose, but basically intelligent nevertheless. But, observant and insightful though I usually am, I still make mistakes.”

His hands flash in the air, molding the picture he is describing.

“This world . . . belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn’t challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?”

“Mr. McMurphy . . . my friend . . . I’m not a chicken, I’m a rabbit. The doctor is a rabbit. Cheswick there is a rabbit. Billy Bibbit is a rabbit. All of us in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees, hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, we’re not in here because we are rabbits—we’d be rabbits wherever we were—we’re all in here because we can’t adjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place.”

“You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Zap!

“And you, Mr. McMurphy,” she says, smiling, sweet as sugar, “if you are finished showing off your manly physique and your gaudy underpants, I think you had better go back in the dorm and put on your greens.”

The clock at the end of the mess hall shows it’s a quarter after seven, lies about how we only been sitting here fifteen minutes when you can tell it’s been at least an hour.

“And even when I pr-proposed, I flubbed it. I said ‘Huh-honey, will you muh-muh-muh-muh-muh . . .’ till the girl broke out l-laughing.” Nurse’s voice, I can’t see where it comes from: “Your mother has spoken to me about this girl, Billy. Apparently she was quite a bit beneath you. What would you speculate it was about her that frightened you so, Billy?” “I was in luh-love with her.”

If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.

McMurphy wasn’t like that. He hadn’t let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, anymore than he’d let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit.

Then they crossed the moon—a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose.

“Now lobotomy, that’s chopping away part of the brain?” “You’re right again. You’re becoming very sophisticated in the jargon. Yes; chopping away the brain. Frontal-lobe castration. I guess if she can’t cut below the belt she’ll do it above the eyes.” “You mean Ratched.” “I do indeed.” “I didn’t think the nurse had the say-so on this kind of thing.” “She does indeed.”

Our team was too short and too slow, and Martini kept throwing passes to men that nobody but him could see,

“And the last I see him he’s blind in the cedars from drinking and every time I see him put the bottle to his mouth he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him until he’s shrunk so wrinkled and yellow even the dogs don’t know him, and we had to cart him out of the cedars, in a pickup, to a place in Portland, to die. I’m not saying they kill. They didn’t kill him. They did something else.”

“No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind.

The drain at their feet kept choking short little gulps of air and soapy water.

A man out of sight can’t be made to look weak, she decided, and started making plans to bring him back down to our ward.

McMurphy groaned and opened one eye bloody as a hatching egg.

The nurse took out her pad again. She was stiff in the joints, and her more than ever white hand skittered on the pad like one of those arcade gypsies that scratch out fortunes for a penny.