Summary Miss Ratched, known to her patients as ‘Big Nurse’, has her ward at the mental hospital well under control. The patients’ lives are regulated according to a strict routine. In her reign she is aided by three Negroes in white jackets, their sadistic tendencies strictly controlled. Her patients are divided into the Acutes and the Chronics. The first undergo therapies; the second are also known as the incurables and will probably spend the rest of their lives on the ward. The Chronics are subdivided into the Walkers, who are able to work, the Wheelers, who can move about in a wheelchair, and the Vegetables, who are almost completely paralysed. The admission of a new patient, the redheaded Irish-American called Randle Patrick McMurphy, causes a disruption of the routine. McMurphy refuses to take a shower, and introduces himself to the other patients as a gambler who has come to liven things up. He admits to them that he is only pretending to be mentally unbalanced in order to escape the hard work of the prison farm where he has been serving time. At first McMurphy is confused by the atmosphere of the ward, where Big Nurse has everyone eating out of her hand, weekly participating in humiliating group discussions and spying on one another. Harding, a university graduate, explains to McMurphy how Big Nurse keeps everyone under control by subtile but constant and effective pressure. He also explains the danger and the consequences of being sent upstairs to the Disturbed Ward, where patients are given shock treatments or even brain operations, called lobotomies. McMurphy sets up a bet that he can upset the Big Nurse within a week. McMurphy’s presence brings the ward to life. For once, there’s no fog blurring the vision of the narrator, “Broom” Bromden. Chief Bromden is a very huge, 35 years old Indian, son of ‘Tee Ah Millatoona’ (The-Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-On-The-Mountain) chief of an Indian tribe in the Northwest of the United States. He had a white, dominant mother, who gave him his back name. The last twenty years he spent on the ward of the Big Nurse, pretending to be deaf and dumb. The Chief is affected with a persecution mania. In his delusion, the Big Nurse is the local representative of the ‘Combine’: an elusive organisation of people who conspire to keep a hold on the American society and to keep down every sign of creativity and individuality. The ways the Big Nurse uses to keep them down are tranquillisers, ‘therapeutic’ group meetings, electroshock treatments and lobotomy. The Chief is called ‘Broom’ because he spent the last twenty years pushing a broom about the ward. McMurphy fights against the System by constantly breaking the rules, cracking jokes, and organising unusual activities. After one week, the first showdown between Randle and Nurse Ratched begins. With a great deal of difficulty, Randle gets the majority of the patients to vote with him to have television set turned on in the afternoon instead of the evening, so the patients can see the World Series, the yearly baseball championships. Nevereless, Big Nurse turns the television off. With McMurphy, the other patients protest by continuing to watch the black screen until the Big Nurse loses her temper. McMurphy won the bet. One day McMurphy learns by chance that he is ‘committed’ to the hospital. He can only leave the ward if Big Nurse says he’s cured, not just when his prison time is up. From that moment, he becomes a model patient, co-operating carefully. The other patients are disappointed, feeling that their hero has betrayed them. Only when one of the patients, his ‘buddy’ Cheswick, drowns himself in the swimming pool because he felt betrayed, McMurphy starts to rebel again. Twice he breaks the window of Nurses’ Station, where Nurse Ratched has been keeping the men’s cigarettes, and rationing them out. Mc Murphy organises a basketball game and even a whole day’s fishing trip on the Pacific Ocean, on which even the Chief goes with. Just a few days before this trip the Chief talked for the first time in twenty years. During the next days, he talked a lot with McMurphy. During the trip the Chief talks and does just what the other men say him to do, and no one seems to care that the Chief isn’t really deaf and dumb, not even the doctor. Not only the Chief got more self-confidence and becomes an individual. On their way to the fishing boat, all the patients realize for the first time that their illness can have the aspect of power, and it makes them feel good. On the trip, the patients are chaperoned by Candy, McMurphy’s girlfriend, and the doctor, who catched the biggest fish of the day. At the end of the trip, the Chief notices for the first time that McMurphy looks tired and discouraged, and that he is keeping up his bold, cheerful act for the sake of the men. Behind his back the Big Nurse tries to convince the other men that McMurphy is only interested in the financial profit he has been making on the games and outings. Most of them believe her. Then, during an enforced shower, one of the Negro attendants tries to bully George, a chronic that accompanied them on their fishing trip, a patient who has a pathological fear of soap. Coming to Georges defence, McMurphy gets into a fistfight with two attendants, and the Chief helps him beat them off. For this violent conduct, McMurphy and the Chief are sent upstairs, to the Disturbed Ward, to receive shock treatment. Chief Bromden comes out of the treatment completely cured and ready to leave, but he stays to see what will happen. McMurphy got three electroshock treatments that week, because he refuses to admit that his conduct was wrong. Back on the ward, McMurphy organises a party for Billy Bibbit. He bribes mister Turkle, the old Negro night attendant, to let the two girls Candy and Sandy into the ward in the middle of the night. McMurphy sends Candy to bed with Billy the stutterer, while the rest of the patients drink and have a good time. They make a very big mess, but they all feel great. Turkle agrees to let McMurphy escape from the hospital with the girls just before Nurse Ratched arrives in the morning. Unfortunately, everyone is still asleep when Nurse Ratched comes in and discovers a girl in bed with McMurphy and an other with Billy. She threatens to tell Billy’s mother about his being caught with a prostitute. Billy, who is terribly afraid of his dominant mother, kills himself by cutting his throat. When miss Ratched blames McMurphy for Billy’s death, he loses his temper and tries to strangle her. He is sent off to the Disturbed Ward again. When McMurphy is brought back to the ward some weeks later, he has undergone lobotomy. He is hardly recognisable. Chief Bromden decides to kill McMurphy before he regains consciousness, rather than let him sit in the ward serving Big Nurse as a meek example of ‘what can happen if you buck the system’. The Indian, whose strength and self-confidence have been given back to him by McMurphy’s presence, smothers McMurphy in a pillow. Then he escapes from the hospital by throwing a control panel weighing a quarter of a ton through a window. He heads north, planning to visit his tribe on his way to Canada.