The Shock Shop

Chief recollects a past experience with shock therapy. It is a unique passage because although it it somewhat crazy, it is also possible that Chief is not even hallucinating and is talking about his experience in reality. On pages 125-126 he says,

"I'd wander in the fog, scared I'd never see another thing, then there'd be that door, opening to show me the mattress padding on the other side to stop out the sound, the men standing in line like zombies among shiny copper wires and tubes pulsating light, and the bright scrape arching electricity. I'd take my place in line and wait my turn at the table. The table shaped like a cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band running across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table looking up from his dials and down the line and pointing at me with rubber glove."

While Chief is already hallucinating about the fog machine, he winds up in the shock shop. Here he will yet again be controlled and terrorized by the machines again. This is portrayed in an extremely inhumane and frightening way. It's once again showing the overpowering evil dominance that the machines (The big nurse included), have over Chief and all of the patients. Although it is probable that Chief actually did hallucinate parts of the experience, the effect that the machines are continuing to have over him, real or not, also symbolic of how hopeless Chief is against the combine. He has recently become engulfed in Fog from the machine extremely often, and he is also going crazy as a result of shock therapy. Considering this, I think that the machines, even the real ones too, are making it impossible for chief to succeed in becoming healthy again. I really can't tell if he can get better at this point or not. Also another question that I have had about the outcome of this book, is if Mac will suffer anything near the same fate as that of the other men on the ward who are at the mercy of the machines?

Power of Nurse

"We mustn't let McMurphy get our hopes up any different, lure us into making some kind of dumb play.  She'll go on winning, just like the Combine, because she has all the power of the Combine behind her... To beat her you don't have to whip her two of three or three of five, but every time you meet... I know now there is no real help against her or her Combine." (109-110)

Chief knows that the nurse isn't unbeatable because she herself is too powerful a person, she is unbeatable because she has the Combine behind her.  Not only is the Combine behind her, though, it is her Combine.  Many of the men think that the reason they can't become free and are tortured is because of the power of the nurse, but the nurse has a whole machine behind her.  She can't singlehandedly control all of the patients.  She has her team of black boys, the doctor, and other nurses all who do exactly as she orders and enforce her rules.  Not to mention, she is friendly with the head nurse.  Every person working in the hospital is behind the nurse and her Combine.  Although, I don't see why Chief doesn't think to go for the Combine.  I understand his paranoia and schitzophrenia impairs him, but why doesn't anyone think of going for the black boys and the doctor and the other nurses, the Combine, to overthrow the nurse.  This doesn't happen until McMurphy comes in and talks to the doctor about having a Carnival and asking about the music.  He goes for someone with power and then gets all of the patients to agree with him.  Then, the nurse talked about taking it up with the board... why doesn't anyone ever go to the board to present their case?  This may be the nurses Combine but it isn't a functioning machine without all of the working components.  And, if you make everything become out of whack except for the nucleus, it is no longer a functioning machine.  

Also, Chief says that you have to win every time you meet the nurse.  That just means that you have to carefully pick and plan out what battles you chose to start.  Have a plan of action before there is an argument so that you do indeed win.  Also, nothing can be done singlehandedly.  Chief needs to help McMurphy help the Combine.  

Going In The Dam...

At the start of a new section, page 82, Chief has a brief hallucination about sinking into a big, factory-esque dam. He describes the wires and brass, but portrays an image that the dam is more powerful than he or any other human:

"...reveals a huge room of endless machines stretching clear out of sight, swarming with sweating, shirtless men running up and down catwalks, faces blank and dreamy in firelight thrown from hundred blast furnaces...like the inside of a tremendous dam. Huge brass tubes disappear upward in the dark. Wires run to transformers out of sight. Grease and cinders catch on everything, staining the couplings and motors and dynamos red and coal black" (83-84).

Aside from the obvious references to his previous work in the factory, I think this brings up several things about Chief as well as some themes from Kesey. Chief did not enjoy his time in the factory, and makes a clear parallel between the fog and "machines stretching out of sight." To me, dam's are powerful, impenetrable. While some may suggest that it hints at the flowing water, or status quo, that can be stopped, I believe it is meant to show the opposite. That water is the most powerful thing on the planet and it is impossible to predict or stop. Finally, I think Kesey adds references to Freud with his use of sweating, shirtless men in the factory. Maybe it is to represent the envy Chief has for these men, or maybe it is to show Chief may be gay or even Kesey may be gay. 

I think there is a lot more to learn about Chief that he won't say, which will probably come out in Freudian symbols.

Control Panel

McMurphy and a few of the other men on the ward try to find something to throw to bust out the window. They think about a chair, a table, a bed, and then they get the idea to throw the "big control panel with all the handles and cranks" (page 119) out the window. McMurphy tries to convince the others that he will be capable of lifting and throwing it, but they have the scepticism.

"He steps up to the panel and lifts Billy Bibbit down off it and spits in his big callused palms and slaps them together, rolls his shoulders...His arms commence to swell, and the veins squeeze up to the surface... His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift... Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls back limp against the wall" (pages 120-121). This is the one thing that we have seen McMurphy fail at. The control panel symbolizes the combine. No matter how hard he tries to fight the combine itself, or how it tries to change the men on the ward, he will not be successful. All the other men know he will not be successful too, but they have a little bit of hope that he will be able to do it, and that's why they decide to place the bets afterall.

The Combine

At the very beginning of one of our assignments, Chief starts to question why McMurphy has not been adjusted or changed by the combine: "Maybe, like old Pete, the Combine missed getting to him soon enough with the controls...keeping on the move so much that the Combine never had a chance to get anything installed" (89). Chief claimed that since he had been moving all around the country and never settled down in one place for a long enough time, the Combine never was able to install anything or program something into him because he wasn't able to be broken down. As soon as he felt he was being changed, he could have just gotten up and left in order to avoid becoming a product of the Combine.

I think that this passage shows Chief is jealous of McMurphy in a way. He wishes that he could have escaped the Combine just as Mac did. He is envious of the way McMurphy does not care about many things and how he does not get paranoid or retreat into a fog. I also think that its not just Chief who is jealous of him. I think all the guys on the ward look up to McMurphy because they see the way that he rebels against the nurse and the way he manipulates the doctor. All the guys wish that they could have escaped, but only one was fortunate enough. Now we just have to wait and see whether or not this Combine gets to McMurphy.

The Fog

"....just like the fiends in that room was conducted in a beam along the fog and pulled me back along it like a robot."(125)  In this passage Chief is expressing his new opinion on the fog.  He used to think the fog was a scary place and wanted to be rescued from it.  McMurphy was the guy that was to rescue them from the fog.  Whenever Chief used to wander in the fog he always wound up at the same place almost as if a robot had pulled him in.  The door to Shock Therapy.  Chief does not want to get his hopes up about McMurphy rescuing the patients from the fog.  Big Nurse appears to powerful and in Chiefs mind McMurphy has just won a little battle in a big war.  Chief now thinks it will be better if he stays put in the fog and does not try and escape.  "You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could just relax and lose yourself."(125) Chief seems to have chosen the second choice and given up on escaping the ward's power over the patients.  

I was unclear of the definition of combine so here it is from dictionary.com which took it from the Columbia Encyclopedia. 

"Combine, agricultural machine that performs both harvesting and threshing operations.  Although it was not widely used until the 1930s, the combine was in existence as early as 1830.  Early combines were traction-powered and drawn by horses, or later, driven by steam internal-combustion engines.  Self-propelled units appeared in the 1940s and have been adopted worldwide.  Modern units feature dust-free, air conditioned cabs and can handle more than 100 acres (41 hectares) of grain per day.  Originally developed for cereal grains, the combine has been adapted to legumes, forage grasses, sorghum, and corn.  The basic operations of the combine include cutting and gathering the standing crop, threshing the seed from the stem, separating the chaff, collecting the seed in a hopper for a delivery to a truck, and returning the straw to the ground.  the combine has replaced the reaper; the binder, which cut and bound a harvested crop into bundles ready for threshing; and the thresher. See C. Culpin, Farm Machinery (12th ed. 1992)

Another World

Chief really goes out of his way to explain how the world inside the ward is mechanical and logistical with little to no emotion in anything.  I don't understand how anyone can be cured in that type of sterile environment, especially psych patients who are in need of loving care.  Chief places the ward inside a world of its own, with a highly detached connection from the outside world.  The ward's world is a machine where everything has to work like clock work.  I wonder what Chief's experience was like in the real world before he came onto the ward, because he seems to know that this world is different from others.  

The first time we hear of world outside the ward is when McMurphy comes onto the scene.  McMurphy is very earthy, with his hands all cracked from working in the fields, which is a polar opposite from mechanical.  Upon entering the ward McMurphy laughs causing , "Dials twitch in the control panel at the sound of it... They're fidgeting and twitching responding to the dials in the control panel; I see McMurphy notices he's making them uneasy, but he don't let it slow him down." (17)  McMurphy is the only true form of human life when he comes to the hospital.  He laughs like a normal human being, something that Chief said he hadn't heard in seven years.  The sterile environment made McMurphy uncomfortable, which makes us think that he will be changed by his surroundings.  The ward "makes" and "fixes" machines, having them be like every other machine with no individuality what so ever.   

Bromden sees society as a giant machine. At the beginning of the book he explains how Big Nurse is very machine-like. He explains, "she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load... A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it" (page 5-6). When he talks about her movements, he explains how they are precise and automatic, very machine-like. When she is first introduced to us, she is carrying a bag full of gears and wheels. Big nurse is seen as a machine by Chief and is trys to turn all the patients into machines before setting them free into the world. She has mostly all the power and is inhuman in the way she treats all the patients.

"Fixing" Patients In The Ward

We are nearly a third of the way through the book, and have learned a lot about Chief, as well as several other people on the ward. Chief has repeatedly claimed that the goal of the ward is to "fix" people in order for them to work properly with the combine. At one point, he is looking at workers restraining an old Blastic. While we expect to see blood and guts everywhere, we see rust and machinery

"The worker takes a scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but there's no blood or innards falling out like I was look to see-just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a piece of wire or glass. Worker's standing there to his knees in what looks like clinkers" (85).

Kesey is obviously setting up a major contrast between Chief and the Ward, in terms of tactics, beliefs, and morals. In this specific example, the Ward is trying to fix Blastic who has "gotten out of line" in order to rehabilitate him for society. I think the rust and ashes are interesting because it shows that there is some wear and tear with Blastic, suggesting that maybe the Ward's tactics are not working. With Chief, his tactics have worked in playing "deaf and dumb" and has formed alliances among several of the other patients. 

I expect to see a "human" vs. "machines" conflict brewing inside the ward. While it won't be actually fighting, I think it will be scheming and strategizing against one another.