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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest depicts the act of escape as paradoxical and even a mystery. The rowdy Randle McMurphy is in truth only half-hearted about running away. The hospital irritates and fascinates him equally: for all his defiance, he is more ensnared by the institution than at first appears. He is captivated. And this is the iron law of asylum politics: the environment is always more powerful than it seems. It calls the tune. The seeming Pied Piper and Lord of Misrule isn’t so much a liberator as a puppet in a perverse institutional drama of brinkmanship and collusion. Chief Bromden (the novel’s narrator) alone perceives that McMurphy is the least autonomous of all the patients, a follower used by the group not its leader:
We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes.*
We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes.*
The ward is a performance space, theatre of projection and gladiatorial arena. McMurphy’s combat with Nurse Ratched is a lethal game of provocation and retaliation which shows the assembled spectators that full-scale revolt isn’t worth the trouble. In effect McMurphy is not a threat to the hospital regime: he serves rather to steady the system by bringing its iron law to light. His sacrificial fate unmasks the violence of asylum power sufficiently to convince everyone to stay within the limits of safe disobedience.
Everyone, that is, except Chief. Considered a hopeless, mindless case, he is the only one who eventually breaks the institutional grip. In the novel, he is also unusually sensitive to oppression of an overwhelming kind. When he was a boy he watched crooked businessmen cheat his tribe. Ever since then he has built upon the faith foundation of his ancestral traditions an esoteric theory of the world, incorporating what psychiatric jargon labels ideas of reference, which makes him both cautious and insightful. He believes that the hospital is just one branch of a mysterious conglomerate: “it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”** The character of Chief suggests that contained in “mental illness” — even in the alarming, alien subjectivity termed schizophrenia — is the potential for true resistance wherever the background iron law applies.
A deep spiritual strength lies under Chief’s muscular strength and it is the combination which enables him to get out. Throwing the supposedly unliftable tub-room control panel through the ward’s reinforced window is only the fruition of his escape, not its entire expression. Without the years of waiting and silence which he calls being cagey, his pronounced and humble feeling of his own smallness, his love for McMurphy and understanding that his friend’s downfall has ended any hope of companionship in resistance, his capacity ultimately to act without succumbing to the groupthink of masochistic ambivalence — to act in earnest, in full noncooperation with institutional power — without all of these elements and more, Chief’s getaway would have been impossible. It might be said that it took him his whole life and all his strange thinking to be able to do what he did when the time came. And it is only by understanding how much else went into Chief’s flight apart from muscular strength that any real lesson can be learned from Ken Kesey’s great novel about what resistance and escape might mean in a world where the architecture of capture is no longer clearly visible.
Everyone, that is, except Chief. Considered a hopeless, mindless case, he is the only one who eventually breaks the institutional grip. In the novel, he is also unusually sensitive to oppression of an overwhelming kind. When he was a boy he watched crooked businessmen cheat his tribe. Ever since then he has built upon the faith foundation of his ancestral traditions an esoteric theory of the world, incorporating what psychiatric jargon labels ideas of reference, which makes him both cautious and insightful. He believes that the hospital is just one branch of a mysterious conglomerate: “it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”** The character of Chief suggests that contained in “mental illness” — even in the alarming, alien subjectivity termed schizophrenia — is the potential for true resistance wherever the background iron law applies.
A deep spiritual strength lies under Chief’s muscular strength and it is the combination which enables him to get out. Throwing the supposedly unliftable tub-room control panel through the ward’s reinforced window is only the fruition of his escape, not its entire expression. Without the years of waiting and silence which he calls being cagey, his pronounced and humble feeling of his own smallness, his love for McMurphy and understanding that his friend’s downfall has ended any hope of companionship in resistance, his capacity ultimately to act without succumbing to the groupthink of masochistic ambivalence — to act in earnest, in full noncooperation with institutional power — without all of these elements and more, Chief’s getaway would have been impossible. It might be said that it took him his whole life and all his strange thinking to be able to do what he did when the time came. And it is only by understanding how much else went into Chief’s flight apart from muscular strength that any real lesson can be learned from Ken Kesey’s great novel about what resistance and escape might mean in a world where the architecture of capture is no longer clearly visible.
* Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962; London: Penguin Classics, 2005), pp. 274–5.
** Ibid., p. 164.