 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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13. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest concludes on a note of apparent triumph, as the Chief hurls the control panel through the ward window, escapes the hospital and begins to hitchhike north. But the triumph may not be complete. Indeed, for most of the book the Chief has been the one to tell us that triumphs over the Combine can never be complete. As he says of its main cog, Nurse Ratched (in Scene 9, Part 1): "She'll go on winning, just like the Combine... she don't lose on her losses but she wins on ours. To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she's won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that." And at the end of the novel, many have lost. Cheswick and Billy are dead, McMurphy is a ruined man saved from becoming another Mr. Taber only when the Chief kills him. Nurse Ratched's power may be reduced, but she is able to return to the ward. Still if McMurphy has not been able to escape the Combine, he has given the Chief and other patients the courage and strength to continue. As the Chief says just before McMurphy's final battle with the Nurse, "The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out any more and somebody else had to take your place." For now, that somebody else is the Chief. Years before, the Combine destroyed his tribe by destroying the waterfall on which their salmon fishing depended. Now, the Chief tells us, the tribe has returned and is using the Combine's dam to spear fish just as they did in the old days-a small but significant act of rebellion the Chief may join. So long as the Chief and others continue the fight, McMurphy can't be said to have lost.
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