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Extract From One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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In this extract from the part 3, everyone is drinking and catching big fish on the boat. McMurphy doesn’t help the men who plead with him to pull in the fish; he just watches and laughs. First, it is evident that McMurphy is deliberately absent because he knows the men need this opportunity to see that they can do things on their own, without him. The patients finally experienced the freedom of action – to be a normal person. When Harding realised that McMurphy would not help him, he "got the gaff and jerked my [Bromden] fish into the boat with a clean, graceful motion like he's been boating fish all his life." Suddenly Harding is not passive anymore, but moves with a "clean, graceful motion", adjectives that they are never associated …show more content…

They’re more relaxed and easygoing, and seem not to think of themselves as mentally diseased in any way. Even Scanlon – a character previously established as the only Acute patient except McMurphy that is involuntarily committed to the ward and wants to blow this up – helps Bromden and "grabs the fish and wrestles it down". The verbs used such as "grabs" and "wrestles" all belong to the lexical field of describing the exertion of physical strength. Through the fishing trip, Scanlon is not physically developed, but psychologically empowered, and that is why the author tries to give the powerful impression. In the narrator's perspective, Scanlon is no longer a weak and vulnerable patient, but powerful. The normality of the patients culminates in the fishing excursion – just about the most normal activity one can engage in. By treating his peers as ordinary, normal human beings, not specimens needing examination, McMurphy has cured them of many of their supposed psychological afflictions. Through this passage, we understand what effect McMurphy has on the patients. In the ward, the most powerful decides whether a person is sane or insane. For most of these men, they simply cannot deal with the shame of not fitting into what is conventionally normal

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