Though she treats her patients as unwanted chores, they ultimately control her life. “It is their incarceration, voluntary or otherwise, upon which her job and role in life depends. Therefore, McMurphy is the ultimate threat – a nonconformist who stirs the residents into a desire for action” (Telgen 222). “Nurse Ratched speaks for the fixed pattern, the unbreakable routine, the submission of the individual will to mechanical, humorless control. McMurphy speaks an older American language of freedom, unhindered movement, self-reliance, anarchic humor and a trust in the more animal instincts” (Tanner 17). While Nurse Ratched triumphs physically over McMurphy, it is his self-committed disciples that check themselves out of the ward, who ultimately prevail. Her authority has already been broken and most of the inmates break free of the institution, disabling Nurse Ratched from ever regaining her tyrannical power over the ward.

Carnival laughter is always ambivalent, then, in its recognition of cyclical change, death and rebirth (Goluboff 485).

As long as these remain his sole motivations, McMurphy is in magnificent control of the situation in the ward. But slowly, gradually his self-interest begins to expand, and a new motive subsumes the other three: a feeling of responsibility to and for the other inmates of the ward – a desire, a need, to protect their vitals from the nurse’s shears. Moreover, with the strengthening of the new motive, McMurphy begins to lose control and to expose his own vitals. He challenges the rules from the first day he arrives, from upsetting the supposedly “democratic” procedure of group therapy to brushing his teeth before the appointed time. McMurphy continues to harass Nurse Ratched long after he has collected the bet, long after he learns that she dictates the length of his confinement, not the court-imposed sentence to the prison farm. When the new motivation leads him to defend another patient from one of the ward attendants and a violent fight ensues, Nurse Ratched starts to snip away. McMurphy is straitjacketed and hauled off for a calming Electro-therapy treatment.

“Manipulative to the core, the only thing that really matters to Nurse Ratched is her desire to control everything around her – the environment, the staff, the patients” (Telgen 224). Her methods are subtle: she speaks with the calm voice of reason, dealing with the patients as though they are children. The group therapy sessions are intentionally humiliating to her patients. Nurse Ratched’s ward at the hospital is a society in itself where she is able to create and enforce any laws or punishments she deems fit. Through the support of the head bureaucratic figure, Doctor Spivey, a man addicted to morphine, indifferent to the quality of life at the hospital, and afraid to act without the approval of Ratched.

The relationship between the white McMurphy and the Indian Chief Bromden is further delineated in Kesey’s strategic Lone Ranger reference. Bromden is McMurphy’s Tonto, the silent but loyal Indian companion under auspices of his white spiritual guide. Equation of McMurphy and the “masked man” not only stresses McMurphy’s savoir role in “western” terms, but overturns the traditional expectation of Indian subservience. The Lone Ranger and Tonto become, respectively, the sacrificial Christ and his independent disciple, a writer of Holy Scripture carrying Good News composed of both men’s values. Only Tonto leaves the asylum: Bromden’s Indian values imbued with McMurphy’s spirit are Kesey’s final answer to the questions asked by the novel. “Strategic use of the Lone Ranger, just before McMurphy’s demise and Bromden’s complete metamorphosis, crystallizes the book’s pivotal racial relationship before redefining it” (Sherwood 8).

Kesey creates finally in McMurphy a modern un-hero or anti-hero who expands himself, through a gradual shift in his conc

Some topics in this essay:
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