And So It Begins...

Upon reading the last few chapters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an obvious external conflict has come into view, the competition between Nurse Ratched and the patient McMurphy. I find it very interesting that McMurphy seems to parallel the nurse in personality. For example, after the confrontation in the day room regarding the music McMurphy “draws a long breath and concentrates on his will power, the way she did” when he knows he cannot win the argument (107). I find it ironic that Kesey chooses to parallel the nurse and the patient often in the novel. I feel that he is proving that the men in the institution are really quite similar to everyone else, that, in fact, they are just like the people who are supposedly curing and fixing them for society. So far, I do not see any real uprising in the works. Though the patients do not want to be in the institution, I still feel that they hold too much fear from things that they have seen. McMurphy has not been in the institution long enough to have experienced the same things that might instill fear in him. I believe that McMurphy will continue to try and create diversions within the institution, for as long as he can at least.