Chapters 7-9 (85-116)

1.   McMurphy’s flaunting of his confidence has influenced the rest of the ward to believe that they too may be able to find their own confidence. McMurphy has the confidence to differ from the normal and bland environment by breaking the routine. He does not abide by the social rules that have been set in the ward. The Chief explained that “McMurphy was up before I am, the first time anybody been up before me since Uncle Jules the Wallwalker was here.”(91). McMurphy broke the routine by waking up before the Chief which was unusual for the ward. He also began singing as he got ready that morning. Laughter and singing were not common to hear in the ward. The ward is not a place for happiness to thrive. Everyone was surprised to hear the singing since as the Chief said “They haven’t heard such a thing in years, not in this ward.”(91). McMurphy is able to create confidence for the others in the ward and also antagonize Nurse Racthed by showing her that they can’t break his spirits. 
2.       The Combine is a big machine room down in the basement according to the Chief. In the basement, they torture and cut open Chronics. They hang the Chronic by a hook and cut them open to reveal what the Chief described as “just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a piece of wire or glass.”(88). The Chief fears that he will be next to be cut open. Nobody else on the ward can see the big machine room though. He wanted to warn the rest of the patients on the ward but he knew they would just tell him “you just had a nightmare; things as crazy as a big machine room down in the bowels of a dam where people get cut up by robot workers don’t exist.”(90). The Chief understands that his vision of the Combine is unrealistic but he still believes that the Combine is real. I believe the fog that the Chief is experiencing is a metaphor for him losing parts of his sanity and is slowly dissociating with reality.

The ward has changed greatly since McMurphy arrived. Before he had come the ward was very separated, the acutes and chronics staying in their groups as well as everything going according to the nurse's plan. When McMurphy arrived he was very lively and wanted to influence others around him to be the same. An example of this is, “ That laugh banged around the day room all evening, and all that time he was dealing he was joking and talking and trying to get the players to laugh along with him. But they were all afraid to loosen up; it’d been too long.(pg81)”. This quote portrays how even though McMurphy was trying to get everyone in the ward to be like him they were scared to, no one wanted to get on the nurse's bad side. McMurphy didn’t care what the nurse thought of him though. He went out of his way to make the head nurse upset, such as when he went out into the ward in only a towel and his underwear. The nurse almost lost her cool but regathered it at the end of their conversation and went back to her daily duties. These things make McMurphy interesting to the Chief. Chief has been there the longest time out of anyone, he's used to everything from the music played to the smell. When McMurphy arrived and smelt like work(sweat) he noticed immediately. I believe he has this smell to him because he was a worker before he’d gone to jail, and workers have their “natural” scent which will stick with them. It’s the same thing as going to a person's house that you’ve never been to before, there's a scent.  

The night where McMurphy makes a scene, causing the nurse to drop the water pitcher on her foot and drop Chief's pill on the ground, Chief experiences “the fog”. While he's in the fog Chief gets shaken awake by a night worker who tells him he’s having a nightmare again. This tells me that “the fog” is Chief's nightmares, and the medicine that he thinks is poison might actually be medication for his mental illness, which may be paranoid schizophrenia.     This disease would explain “the combine”. When talking about McMurphy Chief says, “How’d he manage to slip the collar? Maybe, like Old Pete, the Combine missed getting to him soon enough with the controls. (pg92)”. Since McMurphy is so “out there” Chief thinks the combine didn’t get their controls into McMurphy soon enough. The combine is what Cheif thinks keeps everyone in check, what makes everyone act normal. He believes that people actually have controls placed inside of them by the combine. This paranoia, coming up with the idea of the combine would also be explained by the mental illness of paranoid schizophrenia. Personally, I don’t believe any of the other characters see the combine in the same way. I believe that others see the combine as the rules that are in place to make the people of the ward like the ones outside, mentally well, but don’t think they have actual controls placed inside of them.

You make an interesting point here about the combine.  The idea that they may all experience it differently would mean that they all fear something different, as if the combine somehow taps into what they fear the most. 

McMurphy is like no other in the ward. He is seen getting up early and singing while breaking the rules by brushing his teeth too early. No other patient has ever been daring enough to do that, let alone backtalk the Big Nurse. McMurphy is fed up with the ward after a day of being there and decides to stir up trouble by knocking on Big Nurse’s door and asking her to turn her music down. This action is not well received and Big Nurse is very upset. Later McMurphy has a conversation with the doctor and seemingly gets along with him. McMurphy somehow convinced the doctor to start a carnival, “[I wonder what all of the men think of] a carnival here on the ward?” (Kesey 108). While McMurphy is organizing a carnival, Big Nurse is not on board. She begins to protest but the doctor puts it down and everyone is excited. Not a single soul on the ward would have stuck up for a carnival, only McMurphy. McMurphy is going to change a lot of things about the ward by speaking his mind and making an influence on the patients and doctors. 

The Combine is a room below the ward that the nurses and Black Boys use to torture the Chronics. One patient is seen by Cheif being dragged down and hung up by his feet. He is later killed. He believes that the Big Nurse is behind the Combine, “there is no real help against her or her combine” (Kesey 113). Big Nurse is the leader of the combine and uses it to experiment on ward patients, potentially killing them. She is inescapable. Chief is scared of it but didn’t mention anything about it until he didn’t take his sleeping pills. Is this all a fever dream, or is it real? Chief only mentioned the patient once after he was killed off. The attention was then brought to McMurphy as if it were cutting it off. It seems as if Chief is interpreting what is going on at the ward differently than others, later impacting the reader’s view of the ward. 

The smells that linger from McMurphy are appealing to chief because he most likely hasn’t smelt it in so long. The ward is likely composed of scents from cleaning products, like chemicals, anti-bacterial odors, and ointments. But since McMurphy has, “growed up so wild all over the country,”(Kesey 92) and is new to the ward, the nature scents still linger with him. McMurphy worked on a farm for years before he was placed in the ward, so he carries that aroma with him. Especially since he's defiant to the black boys in the ward and he doesn’t let them wash him.

The combine for Chief seems to be the power and control of anyone in authority during any given period in life. When Chief talks about how the combine may not have gotten to McMurphy he mentions how he was, “never around one town longer’n a few months so school never got much a hold on him.”(Kesey 92) This gives me the inclination that the structure of a school and its staff that are in authority, would be considered the combine for a kid like McMurphy. The combine is systematic control during the stages of one’s life, which prevents them from doing whatever they want. The ward and its staff create a controlling system in the eyes of Chief, which is why he says that Mrs. Ratched has the combine behind her. Other patients notice this control, as they understand that McMurphy didn’t even win in a meeting he dominated. The patients, “see the same thing. She’s too big to be beaten.”(Kesey 113)

• When describing McMurphys smell, Chief makes the observation that he smells different than everyone else on the unit. Everyone else had been there long enough that the smells of the outside world were long gone, replaced by smells of “germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure…”(Kesey 101). This is intriguing to Chief because McMurphy is different. He's new. He still talks back, and has a fighting spirit.  He reeks of change. 
• The Combine is a figment of Chief's imagination created with paranoia. He is convinced that the staff in the institution are all a part of a system which works to oppress and dehumanize the patients. He feels like he is always at a disadvantage, and that they’ve been battling a “...minor battle in a big war that she's been winning and that she’ll go on winning”(Kesey 113). Chief feels that small wins aren’t enough to do any change, because of the solid reputation and lack of humanity he has left. 

McMurphys smell might be appealing to Chief since his character is very different from the others. A topic I touched on the last response. I assume on the surface. The others smell like the ward, or things like smoke. While McMurphy is fairly recent, he still smells like the farm he worked at. I think this can symbolize something new, hope, or change within the ward.

The combine is what Chief considers the machine, the ward. He thinks the workers are also behind it, including Ms. Ratched. He thinks that the Combine hasn’t got McMurphy, mostly because he's new, or that he seems different form all the patients, sort of intertwined with the first question above. The other patients do not see or acknowledge the Combine, it is purely Chiefs delusion. He thinks the Combine is real, but knows that if he told someone else again, they would not believe him. “If I shook somebody awake he’d say, Why you crazy idiot, what the hell’s eating you? And then probably help one of the workers lift me onto one of those hooks himself, saying, How about let’s see what the insides of an Indian are like?” (88)  And when he thinks Ms. Ratched is “bested” by McMurphy, I think that's when his delusions about the combine worsen, and so does the fog. When hope seems lost, or an unfortunate event happens, it seems he sees visions of the combine, or the fog seeps through. “Right and left there are other things happening just as bad--crazy, horrible things too goofy and outlandish to cry about and too much true to laugh about--but the fog is getting thick enough I don't have to watch.” (90)