The End!! Major Spoilers Ahead!! ;)
This last section of the book really was a whirlwind with so much happening in a completely unexpected way. I was especially caught off guard by Chief’s decision to kill his former hero, McMurphy, though I will discuss that passage a bit later on in this post because I think it warrants further examination. Kesey uses the last section of the book to essentially make a martyr out of McMurphy; his act of self-sacrifice is the last piece of the puzzle needed to free the patients in the ward from the tyranny of Nurse Ratched. Despite the fact that McMurphy had a largely positive impact on the patients in the ward, the reader is also forced to confront the casualties that occurred along the way in the form of Billy Bibbit and Charles Cheswick, both of which undermine the virtue of what McMurphy was trying to do.
McMurphy’s attack on Nurse Ratched was essentially a death sentence but his sacrifice proves to be the final act that frees the patients. After McMurphy is subdued, Chief narrates “I hung around another couple of weeks...Everything was changing. Sefelt and Frederickson signed out together Against Medical Advice, and two days later another three Acutes left, and six more transferred to another ward” (319). From his first interaction with the patients in the ward, McMurphy had worked to get them to the point where they could comfortably return to society. Unlike the Nurse, he recognized that the Acutes were not truly crazy, and sheltering them from the outside world had only exacerbated the issues that they actually had. McMurphy’s ability to lend courage to those around him to stand up to the Nurse also extends beyond the Acutes in the ward; it seems as though he also had a profound impact on the doctor as well. At the start of the novel, the doctor cowers in the presence of Nurse Ratched but by the end, when the “doctor was informed that his resignation would be accepted...he informed them that they would have to go the whole way and can him if they wanted him out” (319). Even though the nurse essentially sucks the life out of McMurphy with the lobotomy she had performed on him, the damage has done.
I remember being shocked by Chief’s decision in the movie to kill McMurphy but having read the book, I can understand his rationale at least a little bit better. There was none of what made McMurphy himself after the operation had been completed and his mission of freeing the patients had been completed. Because of this, Chief was maybe doing McMurphy a favor by ending what would have been a completely pointless life as a vegetable in the ward. That kind of life is certainly not what McMurphy would have wanted. I think that Kesey was trying to point the reader towards a couple of different greater significances in this last section but one of them is the idea that even our most revered heroes are still deeply flawed human beings. The nurse sums up many of these flaws when she says “First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit!...gambling with human lives--as if you thought yourself to be a God!”(318). McMurphy was directly responsible for the deaths of two innocent men, leaving the reader to contend with the question: was McMurphy a hero?
