One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest there is one obvious point in the plot line when most everyone changes in some significant way. During the fishing trip we see McMurphy start to lose his strength. He still has just as much power over the other patients as he did before, but as the Chief observed, there is a now quite weakness he struggles to hide from the others. Chief first sees this in the reflection f his face when he thinks no one is looking, saying “the windshield reflected an expression … [that was] tired and strained and frantic…” (218). This perception of McMurphy being tired and pushing himself for the others continues one after the party when the Chief realizes that McMurphy’s like “[a] movie-picture zombie, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters” (267). Bill Bibbit also gains more confidence during the fishing trip, seeing that he did have a chance to get a girlfriend like he had said he wanted after his x-ray and see that there was a reason form him to live and get better. Chief himself was also changed; he had seen the world outside the Asylum for the first time in years and realized there was beauty that he had forgotten in the decades he had been locked inside. He basked in the sudden awareness of the things he’d forgotten, saying “I had forgotten that there can be god sounds and tastes … [I looked] around me to see what else I had forgotten in twenty years” (202). He wouldn’t have been able to remember some of the sights, sounds and feels that made life good if he had never gone on the fishing trip; and because he remembered the good in the world, it gave him a reason to escape later on.
- Kelia Murata

Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York: Penguin Book, 1962. Print.