Lost happiness and scarred: the story of every American
True to the times of 1960s America, where tensions were far from cooling over the wars being fought at the time, Ken Kesey wrote his version of protest against the growing hypocrisies and the government’s increasing intervention into the lives of civilians.
Thus the world got the character of Randle McMurphy — a POW, a non-conformist and a true leader.
From the beginning, Randle has been shown as an American keeping up with the times. Having fought in the Korean war, he was the recipient of a bravery award for having led a charge of imprisoned men away from a Chinese camp. However, he is relieved from duty on grounds of ‘subordination’.
He soon spirals downward with drunken brawls and soon gets arrested for rape. Not suiting the hard labour, Randle pretends to be mentally ill and is therefore institutionalised, which he willingly accepts.
However, as soon as he enters, he meets his nemesis in the form of Nurse Ratched. A stout lady who heads the institution, she likes keeping a handle on everything and treats the operations as a power-play. Inmates are intimidated by her and she likes it that way. But Randle is not one to be tamed.
Though he fakes mental illness, he resists Nurse Ratched’s authority and, if his past was not a clue, he tries to instill self-respect and the hunger of freedom in the other inmates as he says: “If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a 50-year–old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.”
Through his tomfoolery, he makes one friend in the form of Chief Bromden, who is a selectively mute inmate.
But Randle’s act ends one day when he organises a party and gets two prostitutes to take the virginity of his rather timid companion, Billy Bibbit. It does not end well and Nurse Ratched finds out. When Billy voices resistance, she threatens to out him in front of his mother, the only other person he is scared of. This leads him to kill himself and outrages Randle.
He tries to exact revenge and almost manages to strangle Nurse Ratched when he his hit on the head by other attendants. Nurse Ratched gets her way by mentally neutering Randle and he is reduced to a vegetative state. Bromden smothers Randle in his sleep, in an act of euthanasia and thus, relieves Randle.
From the beginning, Randle was representative of America’s angst against the times that their politicians had thrown them into.
A hero at war, the imprisonment clearly has an impact on him and he tries to repeat his act of leading an escape even when he is institutionalised. However, just like the subordination that ousted him from the Forces, he gets into trouble with authority (read: Nurse Ratched) and he is punished. A boisterous soldier scarred internally and leading a life far from happiness, Randle was every American man’s story and every American man’s tragedy.
(The writer is a freelance journalist who spends her time eating, reading and sleeping, when not tackling deadlines.)