I know I will like a book when I can imagine how a specific passage of it would look like if it were cinematised. McMurphy’s dramatic entrance is a perfect example of this.
He sounds big. I hear him coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks, and he sure don’t slide; he’s got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there with the guys looking at him.
“Good mornin’, buddies.”
I can picture it vividly: the somewhat dark lighting so that you can’t really make out his face, the suspenseful music that builds up, the loud carefully measured steps down the hallway, the other patients looking up as he approaches, the tension building and building and building, and then he steps into the light – you can now make out his facial features and you realise that he’s not that frightening, and then he smiles and says “good mornin’ buddies” and you don’t really know what to think. I haven’t read further than the first three chapters so I can’t really judge McMurphy’s character, but first impressions are powerful. He is able to capture the attention of the entire hospital wing and evade figures of authority, which I think foreshadows his behaviour later in the novel; he is not going to let people tell him what to do.
[Side note: McMurphy has great influence over the patients in the ward. One instant in which this is shown is when he is discussing the Chief with Billy. Billy first describes the Chief as being “deaf”. However, when McMurphy pronounces the word as ‘deef’, Billy starts to do so too.]
The character that has made the biggest impression on me so far (besides McMurphy of course) is the narrator, Chief Bromden. The main reason for this is that he is the one that we experience the novel through, which creates a sense of camaraderie between him and us.
This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years.
I also pity him. I don’t think he is the kind of character to appreciate pity, but anybody locked up in a place where laughter is not heard for fear of medical scrutiny is somebody I can’t help but feel bad for. There’s also the fact that he doesn’t seem to have any hope of leaving, nor does he seem to want to do so as he isolates himself from the others by pretending to be deaf and dumb. Perhaps this will change now that McMurphy is there,
The fact that the patients are divided into Acutes or Chronics says a lot about the psychiatric hospital the novel takes place in.
Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine’s product, the Chronics.
“Cull: […] something picked out and put aside as inferior.” (dictionary,com)
Kesey reuses the metaphor of the psychiatric hospital being an industrial machine (or ‘combine’) to highlight the difference between the young ones who are deemed ‘curable’, and the old ones who are “machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired”. This leads to an interesting social dynamic between the two groups that their caretakers encourage.
“Ya know, ma’am,” he says, “ya know—that is the ex-act thing somebody always tells me about the rules …”
He grins. They both smile back and forth at each other, sizing each other up.
“… just when they figure I’m about to do the dead opposite.”
→ I have a feeling that McMurphy is going to upset the status quo of the ward. Nurse Ratched, beware…
Sophie's Spectacular Speculations 