One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Author:Ken Kesey
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Criticism, Literary, Mentally ill, Psychological fiction, Modern fiction, Psychiatric hospital patients, Satire, Psychiatric hospitals, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), General, Medical novels, Psychiatric nurses, Psychological, General & Literary Fiction, Oregon, Literature - Classics, Classics, Fiction
ISBN: 9780143105022
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 2007-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

18

In the group meetings there were gripes coming up that had been buried so long the thing being griped about had already changed. Now that McMurphy was around to back them up, the guys started letting fly at everything that had ever happened on the ward they didn’t like.

“Why does the dorms have to be locked on the weekends?” Cheswick or somebody would ask. “Can’t a fellow even have the weekends to himself?”

“Yeah, Miss Ratched,” McMurphy would say. “Why?”

“If the dorms were left open, we have learned from past experience, you men would return to bed after breakfast.”

“Is that a mortal sin? I mean, normal people get to sleep late on the weekends.”

“You men are in this hospital,” she would say like she was repeating it for the hundredth time, “because of your proven inability to adjust to society. The doctor and I believe that every minute spent in the company of others, with some exceptions, is therapeutic, while every minute spent brooding alone only increases your separation.”

“Is that the reason that there has to be at least eight guys together before they can be taken off the ward to OT or PT or one of them Ts?”

“That is correct.”

“You mean it’s sick to want to be off by yourself?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“You mean if I go into latrine to relieve myself I should take along at least seven buddies to keep me from brooding on the can?”

Before she could come up with an answer to that, Cheswick bounced to his feet and hollered at her, “Yeah, is that what you mean?” and the other Acutes sitting around the meeting would say, “Yeah, yeah, is that what you mean?”

She would wait till they all died down and the meeting was quiet again, then say quietly, “If you men can calm yourself enough to act like a group of adults at a discussion instead of children on the playground, we will ask the doctor if he thinks [146] it would be beneficial to consider a change in the ward policy at this time. Doctor?”

Everybody knew the kind of answer the doctor would make, and before he even had the chance Cheswick would be off on another complaint. “Then what about our cigarettes, Miss Ratched?”

“Yeah, what about that,” the Acutes grumbled.

McMurphy turned to the doctor and put the question straight to him this time before the nurse had a chance to answer. “Yeah, Doc, what about our cigarettes? How does she have the right to keep the cigarettes—our cigarettes—piled up on her desk in there like she owned them, bleed a pack out to us now and again whenever she feels like it. I don’t care much about the idea of buying a carton of cigarettes and having somebody tell me when I can smoke them.”

The doctor tilted his head so he could look at the nurse through his glasses. He hadn’t heard about her taking over the extra cigarettes to stop the gambling. “What’s this about cigarettes, Miss Ratched? I don’t

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