SCENE 12

This brief scene points up the contrast between the world of
nature and the wilderness (which is associated with the Chief's
childhood and with McMurphy), and the drab, regulated world
of the hospital. As the Chief sweeps the staff room, where a
visiting doctor talks to the residents, he stares at a painting
hanging on the wall. It shows a wilderness scene: a fisherman
(just as the Chief's tribe were fishermen), an aspen grove, white
mountain peaks, a world so alluring that the Chief imagines he
can enter it and from an aspen-shaded perch stare back at the
hospital behind him. This art work is one of the improvements
that makes the hospital a better place than the old one. "Why, a
man that would want to run away from a place as nice as this,
why there'd be something wrong with him," says the public
relations man. But how much of an improvement is it really?
The painting is still merely a painting, an artificial vision of a
free and beautiful world to soothe people locked in an ugly
one. Indeed, at the end of the scene, even the visiting doctor
seems lost and unhappy, hugging himself as if for him, too, the
world of the painting, however unreal, was preferable to the
world of the hospital.

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