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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey -  Barron's Booknotes
 
Table of Contents 
 
 SCANLON   
 An Acute patient whose fantasies focus on bombs and  
violence, Scanlon is one of the few to remain in the hospital  
after McMurphy's lobotomy. In the last scene he warns the  
Chief of the need to escape, and reminds him that McMurphy  
has shown him how that escape might be made.   
 SEFELT   
 An epileptic terrified his antiseizure medicine will make him  
prematurely old, Sefelt gives his doses to his friend  
Fredrickson. The damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't  
plight of the two men forces McMurphy to rethink his own  
situation.   
 SHOCK SHOP   
 A nickname for the electro-shock therapy room.   
 GEORGE SORENSON   
 Called Big George for his size, and Rub-a-dub George for his  
obsession with cleanliness, this ex-fisherman is, like the Chief  
and Harding, transformed by McMurphy's courage. He pilots  
the fishing boat expertly after McMurphy convinces him to  
join the trip; later, in the shower, when the aides abuse him,  
McMurphy comes to his rescue, starting a fight that sends  
McMurphy and the Chief to the Shock Shop.   
 DR. SPIVEY   
 Chosen by the Nurse for his timidity (and, it's hinted, for a  
morphine habit that makes him vulnerable to blackmail), Dr.  
Spivey is concerned more for his theories and papers than for  
the welfare of his patients. He begins in the novel completely  
under the Nurse's control. However, McMurphy infuses him  
with courage and at the book's end he stands up to the Nurse  
and to the hospital, refusing to resign.   
 CANDY STARR   
 A prostitute from Portland, Candy is one of the few fully  
sympathetic female characters in the book. Young and, despite  
her profession, innocent, she accompanies McMurphy on the  
fishing trip and later returns to the ward so that Billy may lose  
his virginity to her-a date that results in Billy's death and in  
McMurphy's final battle with the Nurse.    
 MAXWELL WILSON TABER  
 Like McMurphy, Mr. Taber was a disruptive influence in  
Nurse Ratched's ward. She defeats him by forcing him to  
undergo a lobotomy that reduces him to a productive but  
characterless member of society-in the Chief's view, just  
another cog in the Combine.   
 TEE AH MILLATOONA   
 The Chief's father, a Columbia Indian Chief whose name  
means The-Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain. An  
enormous man able to defeat his enemies by laughing at them  
(as McMurphy does), Chief Bromden's father was weakened  
by his wife and by the Combine: his wife forced him to take  
her white name and sell off his tribal village to the government  
for a hydroelectric dam; the government (the Combine, in the  
Chief's view) built the dam that destroyed the village and  
reduced the Chief's father to an alcoholic charity case. His fate  
is one of the prime causes of Chief Bromden's illness.   
 MR. TURKLE   
 A night aide friendlier than his daytime counterparts, Turkle's  
main vice is drinking. Bribed with liquor, he allows the patients  
to stage the wild party that forms the book's climax.   
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