SPOILERS all I do here is spoil One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Spoilers.

Blasted through the last hundred pages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest today.

I may have mentioned this already, but the use of the silent Chief as a first person narrator of the book is amazing. It's like a regular narrator that grows into a character interacting with everyone else in the book. A more rational meta narrative effort... by which I mean something more palatable to a regular audience, but still allows for that particular reading.

The protagonist, McMurphy, has a great character arc through the book. He starts off commited in the hospital, big and full of life, surrounded by all of the cowed men on the ward, and he can't get what the problem is with them.

In fact the patients problems are two fold, and neither of which McMurphy immediately appreciates. There's the effect of Nurse Ratched's domineering power (she's just a woman guys!) and the very real mental problems the patients are dealing with.

Before I started reading this book I read SOMEWHERE that the mental illnesses contained here were treated as a non-issue. I don't know what that person was reading. Though the effects of mental illness were described as more subtle than you may expect, they were also more pervasive, when it's suggested that McMurphy really is a sort of crazy.

I wrote down this idea from page 140- I didn't quote it down exactly, but it amounts to 'McMurphy didn't let how he looked- the role he was "assigned" in life- order him around. He's his own man.'

This is a huge part of the novel, revealing the truth that people are more than what they appear, and often contradictory at that. McMurphy, despite his brash, brawling, big persona, can paint and wrote letters in "a lovely flowing hand". He didn't allow the fact that those things didn't fit in with the immediate narrative that is MCMURPHY deter him. But it was that confidence that fed back in on itself, and all of a sudden those odd other parts WERE McMurphy, and it makes total sense.

The first bit of action comes when McMurphy realizes that Ratched is behind the lack of spirit on the ward, an idea that the men get behind after some needling. So McMurphy leads the charge, getting increased room for playing cards and getting under the Nurse's skin- making sure never to go so far as to warrant electro shock treatment, and thus avoiding the power of Ratched's full retribution.

Or so he thinks.

It isn't until a trip to the pool, where an old football player who thinks he's just a couple of weeks from getting back on the field (as he's thought for a long time now) moonlights as the lifeguard (I still don't know how that works) and informs McMurphy that Ratched has the power to extend a stay at the hospital.

At least in jail you knew when you were getting out. And forget the electroshock, this was Ratched's true power, at least over McMurphy.

So McMurphy quiets down, plays by the rules, and "get's sly". He eventually calls out the other patients for letting him be the fall guy, asking for other stuff, being the voice for the revolution, and the brunt of ultimate retribution. There's never any hard feelings about it, McMurphy even finds it funny, the con man getting conned, and by a ward of hospital patients. But then he's told something that really surprises him.

He's not on equal footing with the other patients around him- he's worse off! Most of them are voluntary patients, and could leave at any time. Not him, he's stuck.

McMurphy begins to realize these patients are more different from him than he'd previously thought.

He begins to act up again, only much worse than before, seemingly no longer worried about the electro shock OR release. He arranges a boat trip for a few inmates (asking sweet as you please to the nurse), driving down with this girl Candy and one of the Doctors, who was pretty easy to convince to come along, what with Candy around.

The trip is notable for how much laughter and life brought out of all of the parties, everyone has a great time, even the germaphobe 'rub a dub' George. On the trip back everything still seems great, McMurphy is soothing the crowd with his stories of a life fully lived, but a quick glimmer of light (from either the moon or a streetlight or something) flashes on him, and the narrator sees how tired and strained he looks.

I think it was still on the trip home that McMurphy arranges a date between Candy and Billy Bibbit for 2am in two weeks on the saturday night. So that's something to look foreward to.

For cruelty's sake more than anything, the members of the boat trip are subjected to a sanitizing shower with some strange delousing agent hosed onto each man. Mostly a fair enough proposition, but when they come up to George, he's terrified of whatever is being put on them. As George is freaking out McMurphy steps up to get the guys with the hose to back off- which they don't, they're having a great time.

So McMurphy takes his sweet time beating the guy- taking his time to enjoy it, because he knows after this he's getting moved up to the disturbed ward, and a step away from the electro shock. When one of the other attendants steps forward to help his coworker, the narrator/Chief lends a hand. So both McMurphy and the narrator get sent up to disturbed.

I've gotta say, how the relationship between McMurphy and the narrator progressed so that the Chief would help out, instead of being "lost in the fog" was awesome. From the point at the beginning where McMurphy is the only one to figure the Chief CAN hear and speak, despite what people think, to his growing admiration of McMurphy, to them actually speaking to each other, and McMurphy promising to make the Chief 'big' again... and he was certainly a mountain of a man by the time that fight in the shower took place.

It's not long before the two of them do get sent for electro shock. McMurphy was offered the chance to apologize to Nurse Ratched and avoid the whole thing, but that wasn't happening. He martyrs himself to give a larger than life figure for the boys on the ward dowstairs, but wouldn't you know it- he made it through the elctro shock alright!

In fact, he gets sent back again and again, keeping up his bravado the whole time, and by the time he does return "home" to the regular ward, he's a legend!

And good news- it's almost been two weeks, time for Candy to come back!

Now, I didn't expect that two week date to still be something they'd get to in story, but apparently you can fit in a lot of electro shock and recovery and electro shock and recovery in the span of two weeks. In fact, the whole timeline of the book surprises me this way. It feels like in most books this story would take place over the course of a year at least, but it may have only been a few months. It's an odd bit of pacing.

So they convince the night guy to open the window, and in comes Candy and Sandy for a night of partying. They make a huge mess, everyone gets drunk, Billy Bibbit and Candy get a room, and McMurphy says his good byes, because after an hour of sleep he's outta there.

Which felt weird, as far as endings go... incomplete... and then what about all those extra pages after... oh I see they slept in and didn't escape and now they're in tru-uble.

All of the inmates are having a great time, laughing at all of the evidence of their crimes, especially once Ratched opens the door to find Billy and Candy in a secluded room, but Ratched turns the 'for shame, so disappointed in you, I'm telling your mother' weapon on Billy, whose stutter immediately turns up to 11, and starts saying it was Candy's fault, it was McMurphy's fault, it was everyone else's fault.

It felt like such a huge betrayal! How could Billy do that?

But this is when it's clear, he truly wasn't ready, his illness was still enough to leave him susceptible to Ratched, so much so that when he's left alone in the Doctors office (and it's only RIGHT NOW that this is so clearly about to happen) that he kills himself.

McMurphy could have still snuck out, as was mentioned a few pages before (and I wouldn've this mentioned here, but I didn't find a good place to mention it) but when McMurphy was saying his good byes he discussed with Harding the source of mental illness. Harding's theory was that, for him anyways, it was not his being gay (not that they ever out and out say that exactly, but they as much as said it), but the level of shame and ostracization from society that was bred from his being gay.

But that wasn't what made McMurphy crazy (he wasn't crazy before he was committed, and he was never crazy in any stereotypical way): McMurphy, Harding says, is crazy because of "us". The other patients at the hospital. McMurphy has a desire to help out his inmates that isn't rational, because it isn't self serving... no matter what McMurphy's gambling winnings and other screens would have you think, he isn't really gaining anything by staying.

ANYway, after Billy kills himself, McMurphy does the only thing left to him, breaking through the glass and attacking Ratched, and making her lose any power over the other inmates. After she's back, unable to communicate but through a notepad for now, she's an object of derision on the ward, everybody laughs at her now.

She plays her last card, returning the post lobotomy McMurphy back on the ward- but even then she's subverted. The Chief has taken on McMurphy's spirit- the once apparently mute guy is now the one brashly asserting that that ain't McMurphy! Before the swelling can go down, and the legend of McMurhpy can be tarnished, the Chief suffocates him with a pillow.

The Chief tries on McMurphy's hat, which of course would have been to pat had it fit perfectly when he made his escape. McMurphy is McMurphy, 'Chief' Bromden is himself, and so the hat was too small for him.

So most of the inmates decided their time was up and left, the ones who were ready, and Chief Bromden, the narrator, made a Herculean move, lifting up this one control case (that had previously been made out to be impossible for anyone to lift... anyone beside the mountainous narrator) and busting out of the mesh encased window.

I liked this book a lot, I wish I'd written it up better here, put things in a better order, told you about when McMurphy tried to lift that control case himself ("At least I tried!") and I probably should have called the narrator Bromden instead of Chief. It's a book that sticks closely to the action, as though it were a script with stage directions. It somehow completely avoids extraneous prose while also not feeling as spartan as old Hemingway (I should really take a look at that guys oeuvre for comparison, not just relying on my old prejudices. Even though they are really fun prejudices.), it feels like it ends a few times before it actually does, but when it does, it all comes together in the way that a story has to.

And I'm thinking I'm going to go ahead and post this now, I kinda wrote a lot, so I'll catch my typos later.