One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Part 2

For my blog on Part 2 of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I’d like to once again focus on a thought from Chief. On page 162, he is describing the unsuspected oddities he sees from McMurphy- “I was seeing him different when he first came in; I was seeing more to him than just big hands and red sideburns and a broken-nosed grin.” He sees him paint and write letters in beautiful handwriting. This section of Part 2 made McMurphy seem so much more real to me. Like all of us, he has an exterior that most people judge him by, but when alone, can be a very different person. This blurb about McMurphy not only made him more civilized, it made me ask if maybe he was acting the way he was for more than to just be a rebel. Maybe there was a true “method” to his madness. At this point in the novel, I began to see McMurphy as misunderstood soul. I realized that I judged him based only on what he had done since entering the ward and never asked myself why he was the way he was.

Cuckoo's Nest Part 1

While Part 1 of Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has many integral moments to the storyline, I’d like to focus on one page that struck me as being important. Towards the end of Part 1 on page 136, Chief is describing the hard like fellow patient Pete has had. While working as some type of low-grade train operator, Pete had to try substantially hard to perform his job right. Our narrator sets a bittersweet setting for Pete- “So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it.” After reading this line, I realized how it universally applied to almost every man on the ward. Yes, it is true many of them did not function as properly as possible in society and that they had to try harder than the average human just to live “on the edge of it.” This however, does not make them any less human or deserving of the degradation Nurse Ratched gives them. Chief gives a positive outlook, at least for me as a reader, on the patients in the ward. No one is asking for anyone there to function as a normal person, but almost getting to the point where their behavior is tolerable is a very realistic goal, even if it is not seen as being “therapeutic” by the staff.