(about McMurphy) How did he manage to get away? Maybe the mill didn't get to him in time—or to old Pete—to implant the regulators. Maybe he grew up untamed anywhere, drove all over the country, didn’t live in one city for more than a few months as a boy, so the school didn’t take him in hand, and then felled the forest, played cards, roamed with attractions, moved quickly and light and eluded the plant, so that he did not have time to implant anything. Maybe that's the whole point - he eluded the plant, as he eluded the orderly yesterday morning, preventing him from inserting a thermometer - because it is difficult to hit a moving target.
(when McMurphy failed to strangle Sister Raddchet and screamed) It contained the fear of a hunted beast, hatred, impotence and defiance - and if you have ever chased a raccoon, a puma, a lynx, you have heard this last cry of an animal driven up a tree, shot and falling down, when dogs are already attacking him and him I don't care about anything but myself and my death.
(When McMurphy was turned into a "vegetable") I watched them and tried to figure out what he would have done in my place. One thing I knew for sure: he would not allow such a thing, with a pinned surname, to sit in the day room for twenty or thirty years and my sister would show: it will be so with anyone who goes against the system. This I knew for sure.
McMurphy does not know, but only smelled what I understood long ago: main force- not the elder sister herself, but the whole plant, the plant spread all over the country, and their older sister is just important official.
If something prevents her household from acting like an accurate, lubricated, well-oiled machine, the older sister loses her temper. The slightest failure, disorder, interference, and she turns into a tight white lump of rage, and a smile is stretched over this lump. She walks around the department, her face between her nose and chin is cut with the same doll-like smile, the same calm buzz comes from her eyes, but inside she is tense like steel. I know this because I feel it.
This is the older sister. Black with a thermometer followed her. She stands tapping this thermometer against her watch, her eyes buzzing as she measures a new patient. Heart-shaped lips, like a doll's, ready to receive a plastic nipple.
Under her leadership inner world- separation - almost always in full compliance. But the trouble is that she cannot be in the department all the time. Part of her life is spent in the outside world. So she is not averse to bringing the outside world into line. It works together with others of the same kind, I call them a combine - this is a huge organization that seeks to bring the external world into line in the same way that the internal world is brought into line. The older sister is a real veteran of this business, she has been doing it for God knows how many years: a long time ago, when I joined them from the outside world, she was already the older sister in the same place.
Yes. This I know for sure. Branch - a factory in the plant. Here they correct the mistakes made in the houses in the neighborhood, in churches and schools, the hospital corrects. When ready product they return to society completely repaired, no worse than new, or even better, the older sister's heart rejoices; what arrived dislocated, non-native, is now a serviceable, fitted part, the pride of the entire team, a visual miracle. Watch how he glides along the ground with a soldered smile and smoothly enters the life of a cozy quarter, where trenches are being dug for the city water supply. And happy with it. Finally aligned...
“Maybe the plant is not so omnipotent? Now we know what we are capable of, and who will stop us from repeating it?
I'm pleased that McMurphy brought the orderly, that few can. My father knew how - then the government bosses came to pay off the contract, and my father spread his legs, does not raise an eyebrow, squints at the sky. He squints at the sky and says: "The Canadian goose are flying." The bosses look, rustle papers: “What are you? .. It doesn’t happen ... Uh ... Geese at this time of the year. Uh ... Geese - no. They spoke like tourists from the east coast - they also think that you need to talk to an Indian in a special way, otherwise they will not understand. Dad doesn't seem to notice how they talk. Looks at the sky. "The geese are flying a white man. Do you know what they are? Geese this year. And last year, geese. And the year before last and the year before last."
- Combine. He worked with dad for many years. Dad was so big that he even fought them. They wanted to inspect our houses. They wanted to take the waterfall. They even worked on the pope from within the tribe. In the city, he was beaten in the alleys, and once he had his hair cut. Wow, the plant is big… Big. Dad fought for a long time, but his mother made him small, and he could no longer fight, he gave up.
“He ended up drunk,” I whispered. I felt like I couldn't stop until I told him everything. - And the last time I saw him dead drunk in a cedar forest, and when he raised a bottle to his mouth, it was not he who sucked from it, but she sucked from him, he dried up, wrinkled, turned yellow to the point that even the dogs did not recognize him, and we had to take him out of the cedar forest in a pickup truck to Portland to die. I'm not saying they killed him. They didn't kill him. They did something else.
The Combine dealt with him. He conquers all. And you will be defeated. They can't let someone as big as dad walk around the world if he's not theirs. You understand.
The night before the trip, I lay in bed and thought about all this: about how deaf I was, how for so many years I did not show that I heard them talking, and whether I would ever learn to behave differently. But I remember one thing: I did not begin to pretend to be deaf myself; people were the first to pretend that I was so stupid that I could neither hear, nor see, nor say anything. And it didn't start when I got to the hospital; people much earlier began to pretend that I do not hear and do not talk. In the army, anyone who had more stripes behaved like that. So, they thought, you should treat a person like me. And I remember back in primary school people said that I did not listen to them and therefore they themselves stopped listening to what I was saying.
American writer. Known, in particular, as the author of the novel Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey is considered one of the main writers of the Beat Generation and the Hippie Generation, having a major influence in shaping these movements and their culture.
Born in La Junta, Colorado, the son of an oil mill owner. In 1946 he moved to Springfield, Oregon. Kesey's youth was spent on his father's farm in the Willamette Valley, where he grew up and was brought up in a respectable, devout American family. At school and later in college, Kesey was fond of sports and even became a state wrestling champion. After graduation, Ken runs away from home with classmate Faye Haxby. Subsequently, Fei will become the eternal faithful companion of the ideologue of the counterculture and give birth to four children from him.
« Above the cuckoo's nest»
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Novel by Ken Kesey (1962). Considered one of the main literary works beatnik and hippie movements. There are several translations of the novel into Russian.
The novel has been adapted for theatrical production Dale Wasserman in 1963.
The famous 1975 film adaptation of the novel has been criticized by Ken Kesey, in part because the "narrator", which in the novel is Chief Bromden, is relegated to the background in the film.
Time magazine included this novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
In 1959, Kesey wrote The Zoo, a novel about beatniks living in a commune in North Beach, San Francisco, but it was never published. In 1960 he wrote “The end of autumn, oh young man who left his working-class family after receiving a scholarship to an Ivy League school, also unpublished.
The idea for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came to Kesey while working as a night nurse at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park. Kesey often spent time talking with patients, sometimes under the influence of hallucinogens he took while participating in experiments with psychedelics. Kesey did not believe that these patients were abnormal, rather society rejected them because they did not fit into the generally accepted ideas about how a person should behave. Published in 1962, the novel was an immediate success; in 1963, it was reworked into a successful production by Dale Wasserman; in 1975, Milos Forman directed the film of the same name, which won 5 Oscars ( best movie, best direction, best actor and Actress in Leading Roles, Best Adapted Screenplay), as well as 28 other awards and 11 nominations.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Summary
The novel is set in a psychiatric hospital in Salem, Oregon. The narration comes from the perspective of the narrator - a huge Indian named Chief Bromden, one of the patients; The leader pretends to be deaf and dumb, which allows him to be present as a silent observer in other people's conversations. One of the main characters of the novel is the free-spirited patient Randle Patrick McMurphy, who is transferred to mental asylum from jail. He is supposed to have simulated mental disorder just to avoid hard labor. Other patients are presented in the novel, perhaps not as insane, but as normal people rejected by a sick society.
Milldred Ratched
McMurphy is confronted by older sister Mildred Ratched, a middle-aged woman who works in a hospital department. The older sister, the personification of the system (the Combine, as the narrator Chief Bromden calls her), whose personal life has not worked out, carefully strengthens her power over the patients and staff of the department. A rebel and an individualist, McMurphy begins to destroy the order arranged by her and has a significant impact on other patients, teaching them to enjoy life and even freeing them from chronic complexes. He makes various bets with other patients, organizes in the department card games, trying to get a World Series baseball game on TV. Contrary to McMurphy's winning vote among the patients, in which the Chief's vote is decisive, Nurse Ratched unplugs the TV, but the patients remain in front of the screen and pretend to watch baseball - this mass defiance causes Nurse Ratched to lose control of herself and break loose.
M acmurphy
McMurphy's self-confidence is undermined by a conversation with a lifeguard at the swimming pool: McMurphy learns that he is one of the few patients who is not voluntarily on the ward, and what's more, Nurse Ratched is able to extend his stay indefinitely. After that, McMurphy temporarily stops the war with Sister Ratched, keeps quiet and does not break the rules of the routine. Patient Chezwick, who saw McMurphy as a powerful ally in the fight against the order prevailing in the department, becomes depressed and drowns himself in the same pool. McMurphy soon returns to the conflict by breaking the glass window at the nurse's post; he arranges a basketball game in the ward, and later a high-seas fishing trip involving ten patients, including the Chief. This trip, although sanctioned by the administration, becomes a happy day outside the hospital for its participants.
Waiting
Later, McMurphy and the Chief get into a fight with the orderlies in the showers, and they are sent for electroshock therapy, which has no significant effect on McMurphy; The leader irrevocably parted with his deaf-mute mask and freely communicates with his comrades. Still later, McMurphy arranges a secret visit of two prostitutes already in the department itself; at the same time, the infantile Billy Bibbit, handed over to the hospital by a tyrannical mother, loses his virginity with one of the girls, and other patients, along with the night attendant, get drunk so much that in the morning they are unable to either arrange a planned escape for McMurphy or hide traces of nightly fun. When Sister Ratched threatens to tell Billy everything to his mother, he is horrified and when Billy is left alone in the doctor's office, he cuts his throat with a scalpel. Sister Ratched blames McMurphy for this death - after that, McMurphy loses his temper, beats Sister Ratched and tries to strangle her, but doctors beat her off.
This time, McMurphy is sent for a lobotomy, with which he returns in a vegetative state, having lost his "self" and becoming truly mentally ill. Patients who have become stronger and more courageous thanks to McMurphy, freed both from fears of the "normal" world and from the power of their older sister, leave the hospital one by one. In the finale, Chief suffocates McMurphy with a pillow and escapes the hospital by breaking a window.
Quotes and aphorisms from the book
You won't be truly strong until you learn to see the funny side of everything.
To be saved, you just need to start acting.
So, if you want to be alone, are you sick?
I'm not talking to him, but to myself. It helps me think.
Well, what's up, freaks, lunatics, and defectives?
They gave me 10 kilowatts a day, I recharged nicely, now the women below me will glow like casino lights and sparkle with silver dollars.
Communication brings healing effect. Being alone increases the feeling of alienation.
- So, if someone wants to be alone, then he is sick?
I'm talking about form, content... I'm talking about relationships, I'm talking about god, devil, hell, heaven. Is it clear to you, finally?
Every time he hit the bottle, she drank it, not he her.
You have to laugh at what torments you, otherwise you will not keep your balance, otherwise the world will drive you crazy.
Yes. This I know for sure. A branch is a factory in a combine. Here they correct the mistakes made in the houses in the neighborhood, in churches and schools, the hospital corrects. When a finished product is returned to society fully repaired, no worse than new, or even better, the elder sister's heart rejoices; what arrived dislocated, non-native, is now a serviceable, fitted part, the pride of the entire team, a visual miracle. Watch how he glides along the ground with a soldered smile and smoothly enters the life of a cozy quarter, where trenches are being dug for the city water supply. And happy with it. Finally aligned...
- - You were arrested five times by the police for fighting.
- Rocky Marciano has fought forty times and he's a millionaire. - Your hand stains my glass.
- Every day you whine about how hard and unbearable it is for you here, but you do nothing to change everything, to get out of here.
- Lord Jesus, are we going to play cards or play the fool?
- - He was killed?
I'm not saying he was killed. They worked on it. How they work on you. - The only thing I can think about, Sister Ratched, is my life with or without my wife in terms of personal relationships, personality extraposition, form and content.
- She was fifteen, but she looked thirty-five, Doc, although she told me she was eighteen. It was impossible to pass by it, you know what I mean. I would have to sew up the width. Between us, if you saw this red bitch, then you would understand me. No man could resist her. And now they tell me that I'm crazy because I didn't sit still like a fucking vegetable. I would be crazy if I missed this opportunity. No more, no less.
- I was given 10 kilowatts a day. I recharged nicely, now the women below me will glow like casino lights and sparkle with silver dollars.
- My father was big. He behaved the way he wanted. That's why they worked with him. Last time when I saw him, he was blind and barely able to stand on his feet from alcohol. Every time he hit the bottle, she drank it, not he her. He was so dry and yellowed that the dogs did not recognize him.
- We'll be taken back to the nursery for cretins.
- Well, what's up, freaks, lunatics, and defectives?
- - Communication brings healing effect. Being alone increases the feeling of alienation.
- So, if someone wants to be alone, then he is sick? - Move over son, you breathe my oxygen.
- Why were you sent here?
- I don't know. What is written there? - Why did they come up with this idea?
- I think it's because I fight and fuck too much. - - Against what to vote, my friend? So that a sister no longer has the right to ask questions in a group meeting? Why doesn't she look at us like that again? Tell me McMurphy what to vote against?
- Damn, what's the difference? Vote against anything. Is it really incomprehensible: you need to somehow show that you have not lost all your courage yet. - - Randle, if you want, tell me, in your opinion, is everything all right with your head?
- That's right, doc, I'm a genius of modern science. - - Are you giving up?
No, I'm just warming up... - An old Native American game called "put the ball in the basket".
- We can do it now, Mac. I feel big like a mountain.
- Do you see these guys? They are real.
- To be saved, you just need to start acting.
- I always watch the championship, I have never missed it, even in prison ... in prison they show, otherwise there will be a riot.
- I'm talking about form, content... I'm talking about relationships, I'm talking about god, devil, hell, heaven. Is it clear to you, finally?
- I'm not talking to him, but to myself. It helps me think.
- I even tried, damn it?! At least I tried.
