McMurphy learns from the patient serving as the lifeguard that someone who is committed to the hospital is released only at the discretion of the staff. McMurphy had believed he could leave as soon as he served the time remaining on his work farm sentence.
Cowed by his new knowledge, he behaves more conservatively around Ratched. During the next Group Meeting, Cheswick brings up the problem of cigarette rationing, but McMurphy does not support him.
Ratched sends Cheswick to Disturbed for a while. After he returns, on the way to the pool, Cheswick tells McMurphy that he understands why McMurphy no longer rebels against Ratched. Sefelt, who has epilepsy, has a seizure on the floor. Harding mocks her poor grammar, and she says she wishes his limp-wristed friends would stop coming to their house to ask about him. So just quit! McMurphy tells the other patients that he knows now why they encouraged his rebellion without informing him about the consequences.
He now understands that they submit to her not only because she is able to authorize these treatments, but also because she determines when they can leave the hospital. Harding informs him that, to the contrary, Scanlon is the only Acute aside from McMurphy who is committed. The rest of the Acutes are in the hospital voluntarily and could leave whenever they chose. He claims his clothes were stolen.
So McMurphy has scored a point against Nurse Ratched. He brings the vote up again at the next meeting. All the Acutes raise their hands — twenty of them. McMurphy goes around to the Chronics, begging one of them to raise their hand. The next afternoon, McMurphy goes and turns the television to the baseball game. McMurphy watches the blank television in protest, as if the game were really on.
The Acutes join him and they watch the blank TV screen. McMurphy finds out that Nurse Ratched has the power to keep him there in the asylum as long as he wants, and that changes his perspective. At the next meeting, when Cheswick brings up the issue of cigarettes, McMurphy is silent. In Chapter Twenty-Six, having initiated the transformation of the men on the ward in the previous chapter, McMurphy now asserts himself as the controlling force on the ward.
However, Nurse Ratched undermines this force by dividing the men from one another; she exposes McMurphy for his self-interested actions and manipulation. The irony of this situation is that she herself manipulates the patients, while McMurphy has remained fairly honest about his intentions and his entrepreneurial spirit. If the men experienced a transformation from being meek and easily dominated to being more confident and respectable, McMurphy experiences an equally momentous shift in this chapter.
McMurphy assumes the role of selfless martyr in this chapter, defending George Sorenson against the invasive cleaning procedures of the black boys. In the past, his decisions generally benefited him monetarily or built his reputation. But this is a time when McMurphy is motivated least by self-interest, for he can gain very little or nothing from defending Sorenson. This point returns to the contrast between the sexuality of McMurphy and the repression of Nurse Ratched.
The suggestion is that if Nurse Ratched were sexually satisfied, or at least satisfied with her personal life, she would allow greater freedom on her ward. Nurse Ratched does gain a victory over McMurphy in this chapter, but whatever victory she has will be short-lived.
The shock treatment does not significantly affect Chief Bromden; he quickly regains a sense of lucidity afterward and returns to coherence. Although Nurse Ratched maintains a tight grip on her particular ward, she is vulnerable within the institutional structure she uses against her patients.
McMurphy gains power and authority through receiving the electroshock treatment, just as crucifixion and resurrection demonstrate the divinity of Jesus in Christian teachings. The religious parallels and increasing indications of martyrdom cause Nurse Ratched to return McMurphy to the ward, even if she only dimly perceives the depth of what he represents to the other men. His reputation can only grow while he is away; by returning him to the ward she can remind the men that he is not the godlike martyr the inmates have imagined.
Kesey gives further psychological analyses of the more significant inmates. Bibbit has rendered her son a thirty-year-old child; she will not allow him to age precisely because it would reflect that she has aged as well. When McMurphy arranges for the meeting between Candy and Billy, McMurphy is emphasizing his role as a sexual liberator. Given the signs of his martyrdom, there is a strong possibility that McMurphy never intended to leave the ward and that his actions are a form of self-sacrifice.
There are many reasons for him to go, but there are also important reasons for him to stay. That is, they both win and both lose. The confrontation between the two characters finally becomes both violent and sexual, having been set up as sexual by the confrontation between Nurse Ratched and Billy Bibbit over the prostitute. Nurse Ratched has used repressive sexuality as a weapon against Billy Bibbit, instilling in him a sense of shame that stems from both religious sexual guilt and his domineering mother.
Harding even makes a religious allusion to Jezebel that underscores the religious idea of certain kinds of sexuality as sinful. The irony is that her policies and abuses of power are what drove them to their respective deaths. All of her criticisms of McMurphy can be better applied to Nurse Ratched herself, a vengeful goddess over the ward. He effects a literal and figurative exposing of the Big Nurse.
When he attacks her, he exposes her breasts, the one barely suppressed sign of her femininity. The result of this fight is the final humanization of Nurse Ratched in that everyone learns what McMurphy has known from the beginning: she is human and weak and troubled like everyone else.
When she returns to the ward after the fight, she is unable to speak and thus has lost a major sign of her power. While she loses this sign of humanity, she neatly parallels Chief Bromden, who in the course of the novel regains his voice and his humanity. McMurphy ostensibly loses his battle against Nurse Ratched when she orders a lobotomy for him, but the victory is hollow, for she loses control of the ward as the other patients free themselves of her grip and voluntarily leave the hospital.
This is an ultimate win for him and an ultimate loss for her. This circumstance also fits well with the Christian symbolism of the novel; although McMurphy dies for his cause, his disciples leave the hospital to live according to his teachings. They have gained the strength and the freedom to make independent choices as McMurphy proposed that they could.
Chief Bromden best exemplifies the new life McMurphy has enabled. Through the course of the novel he has regained his voice, and he makes the final step toward self-realization when he escapes the ward. Why does Chief and McMurphy get electro-shock therapy? What important event does Ratched miss in the voting? What trick does she pull? What do her actions here illustrate to the men?
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