One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

They are in contact on a high-voltage wave length of hate, and the black boys are out there performing her bidding before she even thinks it.

“This world . . . belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

Failures, we are—feeble, stunted, weak little creatures in a weak little race. Rabbits, sans whambam; a pathetic notion.”

The machinery in the walls whistles, sighs, drops into a lower gear.

She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel.

he can feel it blast against him like a blizzard wind, slowing him more than ever. He has to lean into it, pulling his arms around him. Frost forms in his hair and eyebrows.

There’s long spells—three days, years—when you can’t see a thing, know where you are only by the speaker sounding overhead like a bell buoy clanging in the fog.

There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at that visiting doctor talking with the residents.

When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.

But they kept making the fog thicker and thicker, and it seemed to me that, no matter how hard I tried, two or three times a month I found myself with that door opening in front of me to the acid smell of sparks and ozone. In spite of all I could do, it was getting tough to keep from getting lost.

I had figured that anything was better’n being lost for good, even the Shock Shop. Now, I don’t know. Being lost isn’t so bad.

I can see all that, and be hurt by it, the way I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war. The way I was hurt by seeing what happened to Papa and the tribe.

He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.

It don’t seem like I ever been me. How can McMurphy be what he is?

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.

Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off—the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk—that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

Then they crossed the moon—a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more.

In the morning she sees how she’s stained again and somehow she figures it’s not really from inside her—how could it be? a good Catholic girl like her?—and she figures it’s on account of working evenings among a whole wardful of people like me. It’s all our fault, and she’s going to get us for it if it’s the last thing she does.

And I’m afraid we are witnessing the sunset of EST. Our dear head nurse is one of the few with the heart to stand up for a grand old Faulknerian tradition in the treatment of the rejects of sanity: Brain Burning.”

EST isn’t always used for punitive measures, as our nurse uses it, and it isn’t pure sadism on the staff’s part, either. A number of supposed Irrecoverables were brought back into contact with shock, just as a number were helped with lobotomy and leucotomy. Shock treatment has some advantages; it’s cheap, quick, entirely painless. It simply induces a seizure.”

“Here’s how it came about: two psychiatrists were visiting a slaughterhouse, for God knows what perverse reason, and were watching cattle being killed by a blow between the eyes with a sledgehammer. They noticed that not all the cattle were killed, that some would fall to the floor in a state that greatly resembled an epileptic convulsion.

“I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.”

it’s as if the jolt sets off a wild carnival wheel of images, emotions, memories.

Frontal-lobe castration. I guess if she can’t cut below the belt she’ll do it above the eyes.”

McMurphy doesn’t know it, but he’s onto what I realized a long time back, that it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nationwide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a highranking official for them.

Getting shut of her wouldn’t be getting shut of the real deep-down hang-up that’s causing the gripes.

“But if it was no more’n you say, if it was, say, just this old nurse with her sex worries, then the solution to all your problems would be to just throw her down and solve her worries, wouldn’t it?”

The face moved with a ticking noise till the features achieved a different look.

Papa says if you don’t watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

I can see the . . . seams where they’re put together. And, almost, see the apparatus inside them take the words I just said and try to fit the words in here and there, this place and that, and when they find the words don’t have any place ready-made where they’ll fit, the machinery disposes of the words like they weren’t even spoken.

‘There is generally one person in every situation you must never underestimate the power of.’”

He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is?

The Combine had whipped him. It beats everybody. It’ll beat you too. They can’t have somebody as big as Papa running around unless he’s one of them. You can see that.”

“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.”

They could know because enough of the man in them had been damped out that the old animal instincts had taken over (old Chronics wake up sudden some nights, before anybody else knows a guy’s died in the dorm, and throw back their heads and howl),

“Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn’t it? Food for thought there.”

Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

There’s a singed smell of men scared berserk and out of control, and in the corners and under the Ping-Pong table there’s things crouched gnashing their teeth that the doctors and nurses can’t see and the aides can’t kill with disinfectant.

And when the fog was finally swept from my head it seemed like I’d just come up after a long, deep dive, breaking the surface after being under water a hundred years. It was the last treatment they gave me.

But every time that loudspeaker called for him to forgo breakfast and prepare to walk to Building One, the muscles in his jaw went taut and his whole face drained of color, looking thin and scared—the face I had seen reflected in the windshield on the trip back from the coast.

The thing he was fighting, you couldn’t whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it till you couldn’t come out anymore and somebody else had to take your place.