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.