I just finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and I really liked it. I wish it would have ended differently, but the conclusion made sense.
Some of Bromden’s descriptions of the ward are obviously flat out hallucinations (the fog, the machines in the walls), but some of them seem to be skewed perceptions of people who are actually there. What do you think the reality of the patient who was nailed to the wall was? What about the man on the Disturbed ward who was attached to a hook?
What a sad, creepy story. I haven’t seen the movie, not sure I want to.
I can’t give any real answers because I read the book so long ago, but I did want to point out that the end of either the prologue or chapter one does sort of answer this question, and it’s one of my favorite literary quotes ever:
The patient on the wall and the man on the hook had to have been there in some form, other people saw and interacted with them. Were they being restrained in another way and Bromden imagined the nails and the hook?
I shouldn have read it sooner, it’s out of everyone’s memory now!
I saw a stage production of “Cuckoo’s Nest” years ago, in which the man “nailed” to the wall was presented as real. He was simply a deranged patient who stood against a wall with arms outstretched, imagining that he was hanging from a cross.
At one point, McMurphy pulls the invisible, imaginary nails out of the wall, and the guy limply falls off his “cross.”
I haven’t seen the movie in years, and don’t recall whether it featured a similar scene.
