McMurphy's Clothing Debacle

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey wrestles with authority and how humans choose to respond to it. The reader is introduced to Randle McMurphy, a diagnosed “psychopath” who changes the dynamic in the psych ward of the hospital. The ward is led by Big Nurse Ratched, a controlling authority figure for the patients. She asserts her dominance by manipulating the patients with fear, and controlling everything in the ward to her liking. The narrator, Bromden, feels that she “is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants…” (68). Another patient says that Big Nurse is one of those “people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this … is to weaken you by gettin’ you where it hurts the worst” (54). Big Nurse clearly has a hold on her patients. Until McMurphy comes into the picture.

McMurphy knows her game, or at least he thinks he does. He is determined to defeat her at her own manipulation game. He first tries this by trying to just voice his annoyance, specifically about how loud the radio plays when they are in the day room. He complains multiple times throughout the evening, but eventually gets to bed.

The next morning, he is up and about before 6:45, which is strictly against ward rules, and he is singing, loud enough to wake up Bromden at least. He surprises Big Nurse with his partial nudity, and she is completely caught off-guard by his singing. He has her so worked up that she starts yelling at her employees, a rare occurrence. McMurphy has taken his anger with the constant radio noise, and flipped it on its head to use as leverage. He is taking what Big Nurse has told him and using it against her to get ahead.

I chose this moment from the text because I have used a very similar tactic to get what I wanted. In 4th grade at Greene Street Friends School, gym class was the best class. Unlike middle school P.E, gym class was another word for fun games and challenges with your class. We played kickball, jumped off of springboards, did relay races, and much more. In 4th grade, one of our units was yoga. In comparison, yoga sucked. Many of my classmates agreed.

Greene Street, being a quaker school, taught us about peaceful protesting, and encouraged us to do so if we felt something was unjust. Memorably, we learned about the many sit-ins that happened during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. My classmates and I decided to apply this knowledge to our yoga unit.

We organized a protest and originally got almost half the class behind it. When it came time, we, instead of following our instructor’s directions and movements, sat silently on our mats, criss-cross applesauce. Granted, this protest was completely unsuccessful, and we actually got in pretty big trouble for doing it. And, of course, protesting against yoga is never something I would do now, in fact I quite enjoy a relaxing yoga session. But I stand by our actions, and I would 100% do it again if we were protesting something else. We were exercising our constitutional rights as Americans to peacefully protest, and we were using what the school had taught us to our advantage.

I relate to McMurphy in many ways, and I don’t think that makes me crazy. Although our circumstances were different, we both used disobedience as a way to try to get what we wanted. He truly gave them a taste of their own medicine (no pun intended). And maybe this tactic doesn’t always work in all circumstances. Maybe it ultimately won’t work for McMurphy just as it didn’t work for my classmates and me. But whoever is the target of the “protest” cannot deny that it’s at least a very clever strategy.

Aside from the clever-ness of our 4th grade scheme, there was also a certain innocence that McMurphy lacks. McMurphy’s final goal is to get under Big Nurse’s skin, he doesn’t necessarily care about the bonuses that might come with that. My classmates and I just hated doing yoga when we could be playing games. We weren’t consciously using our newfound knowledge of peaceful protest against the gym teacher, we simply wanted a little more say in what we were learning. And that’s what McMurphy and I have in common, when put in a controlled environment, all we really want is a bit of that control.