One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest Chapters 10-15

Chapters 10-15

The patients have set up a large table for monopoly, and they've been playing the same game over a few days. This increased interest in the game is brought about because McMurphy has convinced the patients to involve real money in the process. Cheswick, Harding, and Martini are particularly enthusiastic participants.

Over the next few days, McMurphy tries to maintain an unbothered demeanour. He keeps a civil tongue with the staff and the nurses, who are always trying to make him lose his temper, except once during a group meeting where McMurphy suggests a slight change to the ward schedule to allow the patients to watch the baseball World Series. He receives no support from the other patients when Nurse Ratched holds a vote to change the schedule. McMurphy is surprised by the lack of support, and he takes revenge by playing fierce games of blackjack that causes many of the patients to have a debt with McMurphy. On the day before the final day of the World Series, McMurphy has another discussion with the acute patients to try and understand why they wouldn't vote. Billy Bibbit and Harding are among those who explain that they have lived in the ward for many years and may continue to do so after McMurphy, and so they believe it is futile to oppose Nurse Ratched. Fredrickson challenges McMurphy for only saying things and never acting on them when McMurphy claims to want to break out of the ward by lifting and throwing an impossibly heavy control panel of metal and cement. He begins to take bets on whether he can lift the object. Nearly all of the patients bet against him. He takes all their bets and begins attempting to lift the object. At first, the patients hoot and mock him, but the effort he makes leaves them all dumbfounded. At one point, it actually looks like he may be able to lift it, but then McMurphy breathes and breaks away from the object, his hands bleeding from the effort. He leaves them all sitting in silence and exits by simply stating that at least he had tried and made an effort.

Bromden talks about the ever-pervasive fog and how most of the patients in the ward like being able to hide in it sometimes. Something that he believes McMurphy is unable to understand, and that makes him keep trying to pull them out. Bromden hears about one of the patients in the Disturbed Ward, Rawler the Squawler, who castrated himself while sitting on the latrine and bled to death. Rawler was a patient that had been moved to the Disturbed Ward for failing to pay heed to the instructions of Nurse Ratched.

He overhears Nurse Ratched talk to the doctor over the phone before the beginning of the therapeutic meeting, and she tells him that she believes that it is time to move McMurphy out of the ward. This seems to set off Bromden, who describes an intense period of the fog, an episode that he believes is likely to be his final step into being a Vegetable. The group meeting is going on around him, and he hears bits of the conversation where Nurse Ratched is trying to humiliate Billy Bibbit. Then McMurphy begins speaking and demands a recast of the votes for the final match of the World Series. When the new vote is held, one by one, all Acutes raise their hands, and although the nurse is shocked, she still claims that the vote has been lost. McMurphy is visibly angry, but all his arguments about fairness are dismissed, and the vote is closed. McMurphy begins to implore the Chronics one by one. None of them raise their hands, except Bromden. His raised hand shocks Nurse Ratched. Later in the day, during the time of the game, McMurphy makes his way to the TV and switches it on. The nurse switches the TV off from inside the nurse station, but McMurphy refuses to move. Just as she is about to come out of the station and yell at him, the other patients follow his example and join him to sit in front of a blank TV screen.

Analysis

McMurphy's constant drive to up the stakes of their betting foreshadows his raising the stakes to life and death. He is frustrated by how the patients have failed to band together to oppose the nurse and blames her for their sorry situation. Bromden's musings on the fog indicate that although it represents the control of the nurse, it still offers something to the patients that make them want to remain engulfed in it. The death of Rawler is a victory for Nurse Ratched, who wins over the patient as he castrates himself. McMurphy's victory in the bet is a result of him defying the nurse's control rather than any hyper-masculine action. Bromden remarks about how insane they all must look to an outsider. This is a reflection of the author's viewpoint that the distinction between sane and insane is unclear.