Summary On this day, Chief is spared electroshock therapy in the Shock Shop. Instead, Big Nurse puts him in Seclusion where he suffers at the hands of the African-American orderlies. When he comes out, he sits in the day room and witnesses the admission of a new patient. The new […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: When the Fog ClearsSummary and Analysis Part 1: They’re Out There
Summary One of the “black boys” boasts to another that he can order Chief — who is “big enough to eat apples off my head” — to do his bidding, establishing Chief, the narrator of the story, as a large, passive, half-Indian. Chief can hear the men talking, which they […]
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Randle Patrick McMurphy A manual laborer, gambler, carnival barker, Korean War hero with a dishonorable discharge, and con man admitted to the ward from Pendelton Prison Farm, diagnosed as a psychotic. Really not insane, he transforms the ward by teaching the other inmates to question arbitrary and repressive authority. Eventually […]
Read more Character ListAbout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Kesey relates the story of the clash between the repressive and rebellious wills, respectively, of Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy from the viewpoint of a paranoid schizophrenic named Chief Bromden. With the exception of a fishing excursion led by McMurphy with an accompanying doctor and eleven patients, the entire […]
Read more About One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestBook Summary
Chief Bromden, the son of a Native American father and a white mother, begins the novel by relating the real and imagined humiliations he suffers at the hands of the African-American hospital assistants. While their treatment of him is tolerated, despite the fact that he is physically much larger than […]
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