SOURCE: Larson, Janet. “Stories Sacred and Profane: Narrative in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.” Religion and Literature 16, no. 2 (summer 1984): 25-42.

In his “wry codicil” to the “Definition of Man” which opens Language as Symbolic Action, Kenneth Burke observes that this symbol-using, symbol-misusing animal is “rotten with perfection.” Goaded by Aristotle's principle of entelechy to make plans for our own completion—plans that could extend with “perfect logic” to our complete extinction (16-20)—we are storytelling animals and creatures who live in stories. Theologians have drawn upon such an understanding of human nature and culture to develop powerfully appealing accounts of life and faith as story. But what kind of stories shall we have? Ethicists David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas write that

a true story could only be one powerful enough to check the endemic tendency toward self-deception—a tendency which inadequate stories cannot help but foster. Correlatively, if the true God were to provide us with a saving story, it would have to be one that we found continually discomforting.¹

(111)

If the world is made not out of atoms but out of stories, what assures us that the narrative structures of our beliefs about God and ourselves bear truth and not fruit that is “rotten with perfection”? Northrop Frye has reminded us that while “truth and falsehood are not literary categories,” for the critic they “represent the directions or tendencies in which verbal structures go, or are thought to go” (17). If it is possible to identify a story form that tends toward truth, that works toward its liberation for the hearers, it would be both dialectical and dialogical. In this essay, I will be tracing the implications of such a story form in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Two distinct narrative expressions of telos together define the form of Ken Kesey's novel: myths, in a vitiated contemporary American mode, and parables, as understood chiefly but not exclusively from Jesus' dominant form of teaching in the gospels. Kesey exposes an idolatrous American archmyth and its parallel god-myth, but he also presses further to test the redemptive power of parable lived and told by his characters and through his book. While Cuckoo's Nest is not a Christian novel—for its wisdom is explicitly secular—its dynamic narrative structure models the possibility for genuine transcendence in this world and liberates its readers through a dialectic of myth and parable. In so doing, Kesey's novel imitates in its non-supernatural way the “logous tēs pisteōs” (words of faith) New Testament writers claim to tell and overturns the “bebēlous kai graōdeis mythous” (profane and old wives' fables) which St. Paul urges his fellow Christians to reject (I Tim. 4:7). It is only as McMurphy's own profane myths and those of the men in the institution are subverted through the power of parable that Kesey's transformed messiah can save and be saved from stories that are rotten with perfection.

In The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade has set forth the ancient function of myth to bring into the present, through the narration of the gods' creative acts, “the irruption of the sacred into the world … that establishes the world as a reality.” This ontological function of myth is yoked to its cultural function: that “which narrates this sacred ontophany,” which “alone reveals the real,” becomes the paradigm for all important activities in a religious culture, vouching for what is done (97-98). Warner Berthoff emphasizes the “principle of generosity” in these basic functions of myth. Its chief purpose is

not explanation (in the sense of interpretation) but recovery, preservation, organization, continuance. … The essential character of myth is plenitude and accommodation, above all the accommodation of the collective mind of men to their own incessant experience.

(281)

That accommodation is also personal: myths give individuals faces to put on. Thomas Mann, arguing for the need to assume an ancient mythic mantle, has called myth “the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration” (314-22).

In this personal appropriation of myth, one might discern the effort to achieve self-transcendence. Yet to the extent that one loses oneself in the legitimizing story—as Burrell and Hauerwas remind us that Albert Speer enclosed himself in the image of “Hitler's architect”—one can perfect the grand illusion, what Ernest Becker has called the “vital lie,” with which we protect ourselves from the consequences of our own and others' acts (ch. 4). If myths are “organs of reality,” in Ernst Cassirer's phrase, how can the reality thus created be judged for its truth? Sacred myth is not self-conscious; it cannot stand outside itself, for to the primitive mind enclosed in its myths, there is no other “real” place to stand. When personal myths are reinforced by all-embracing culture myths, it becomes considerably difficult for the unaided individual to achieve the critical standing place of “self-awareness.” And for the society whose basis of integration is questionable, as Kenneth Burke cautions, cultural myths that give expression to this integration can become a social menace (Literary Form 314-22).

John Dominic Crossan has formulated structural definitions of myth and parable that, with qualifications, will prove particularly helpful in identifying the narrative structure of Cuckoo's Nest, in naming the kinds of stories told within this fiction, and in tracing their theological and ethical implications.² Drawing upon the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Crossan describes what goes on in the deep structure of myth:

an opposition between two terms that cannot be reconciled (binary oppositions) will be represented by two fictional surrogates, and these replacements will allow a reconciliation or mediation which the original pair could not receive.

Through this logic, the mediation may yield an actual “gain” in the story, like the recovery of the Golden Fleece, but the fictive gain is not crucial: “the whole process of mediation and reconciliation implies in itself a gigantic gain,” for one establishes “in, by, and through myth the conviction that mediation is possible” (Interval 51-53). In the realm of myth, dissonances are harmonized; the abstract pattern of rounded closure ensures belief in satisfying solutions in general. Crossan sees the danger in this; Berthoff, in his less skeptical conception of myth, calls it “organized plenitude” (282-83). But in the world of modern history, plagued by failed fictions, many myths do not preserve the plenitude their organization would seem to promise; these Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture would consign to his category of “kidnapped romance,” stories assimilated into ideology of the ascendant class and peddle for the mass consumption of docile citizens for whom these tales cannot really perform the profound functions of myth although they may seem to (26, 57). In a fractured and skeptical world, popular myths struggle to keep alive the belief in mediation and in rounded closure at the risk of mass delusion. It is these bogus myths that are exposed in Cuckoo's Nest.

In his typology of story, Crossan opposes parable to myth:

Parable is always a somewhat unnerving experience. You can usually recognize a parable because your immediate reaction will be self-contradictory: “I don't know what you mean by that story but I'm certain I don't like it.”

(Interval 56)

Instead of reconciling contradictions, the logic of parable creates them within a given situation. At the heart of the parabolic event, “the structure of expectation on the part of the hearer and … the structure of expression on the part of the speaker” are diametrically opposed; in this battle of basic structures, the parable effects “the reverse of what the hearer expects” through a typical sequence of operations: Crossan calls them advent, reversal, action (Interval 66). The familiar situation in which, for example, Jesus' parables typically begin is shattered by what Crossan calls God's “advent,” his act of sovereign freedom that upsets the hearer's cherished story, his righteous expectations, his ethical code. Advent brings a polar reversal of these expectations, and reversal initiates new action, “open[ing] up new worlds and unforeseen possibilities” for Prodigal Sons and their brothers, Publicans and Pharisees (Parables 34). To be truly human, Crossan says, “and to remain open to transcendental experience, demands a willingness to be ‘parabled’ …” (Interval 56)—not only in stories, but also in the surprising reversals of our temporal lives.

The relationship between myth and parable in Crossan's typology should now be evident: myth “establishes world. … Parable subverts world” (Interval 59). In the act of subversion, parable is not anti-myth but “shows us the seams and edges of myth”:

To live in parable means to dwell in the tension of myth and parable. … [Parable] is a story deliberately calculated to show us the limitations of myth, to shatter world so that its relativity becomes apparent.

(Interval 56, 59-60)

If the storyteller begins to mediate the newly created contrast, “the story starts slipping … back into myth” (Interval 55). Correlatively, if the person who has been parabled begins reorganizing his life to achieve and sustain a static coherence, he too has slipped back into living by myth rather than remaining open to the experience of being “parabled.”

This hardening of the outlines can make story idolatrous. As Paul Tillich argues in Dynamics of Faith, myths cannot be removed, for they are the language of faith; but they can be broken, so as to acknowledge their finite character. To break free of idolatrous faith, the modern believer must recognize the myth as a story which is not in itself sacred—and therefore no longer the story of traditional religious societies—but which points beyond itself as a provisional symbol of one's ultimate concern (48-54). In this way Tillich makes room for myth in the skeptical modern world. Parable, I would go on to argue, is a peculiarly appropriate narrative form in which to express a faith that is not wholly demythologized in Bultmann's sense, but that lives in tension with myth, that accepts its human stories as provisional and “broken.” One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, a novel that is critical of its own formulations, shows us that, particularly in a modern world ridden by bogus myths that make false promises to order our existence and bring delusive comfort, an appreciation of the parable's truth-bringing power becomes crucially important in our personal and collective lives. Further, for all its secular wisdom, Kesey's novel points to the power of the Christian story in particular by placing at the center a naturalized version of Jesus as the Parable of God.

In “The Nature of Art under Capitalism,” Kenneth Burke writes that art which makes for acceptance of its culture

enables us to “resign” ourselves by resolving in aesthetic fusion trends or yearnings not resolvable in the practical sphere. … [But such art] tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable … at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question. …

In such times art “must have … an element of suasion or inducement of the educational variety,” that is, “a large corrective or propaganda element …” (Literary Form 320-21). The adjectives in Burke's statement suggest quite different narrative modes of inducement, “propaganda” being perhaps the least useful and certainly least attractive of forms. For if story is to save from delusion and corruption, its way of addressing the reader's experience must acknowledge its psychological and moral complexity—something propaganda cannot afford to do. The gain of parable as a corrective teaching device is that it is so constructed to induce us to change our expectations, experiencing them as lost in order to learn something entirely new.

Especially in its play and film versions, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest has been taken by many as a propagandistic story for the flower-child revolution. But Kesey's book is much more than counter-propaganda directed against America's dreams of order. The novel narratively exposes an American pseudo-myth of gain; it also challenges a conception of deity that is quite compatible with the American dream: the myth of an omnipotent sky-god who flies over the world, touching down just long enough to pluck out the “cuckoos.” These challenges come through a transformational, shifting logic that generates the liberating power of Kesey's work, a dialectic of myth and parable. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest exposes the relativity of story in a parabolic way, for the dialectical structure of the narrative constitutes an attack on the structure of expectation set up by the novel's own title. Through a process of story-reversals, of losses and gains, by which both readers and characters in the novel learn, Kesey persuades us to believe in the possibility of winning—through sacrifice, even death—an authentic transcendence within the natural order.

Before Chief Bromden even sees the newcomer, he hears the Word—a “loud, brassy voice” that “sounds like he's way above them, talking down, like he's sailing fifty yards overhead, hollering at those below on the ground. He sounds big … (Cuckoo's Nest 10). For the Indian, McMurphy is a “giant come out of the sky to save us from the Combine,” from all the social forces that crush men (255). At the opening of the novel, this red-headed hero appears to be the mythic figure which the title promises. Bursting into the deadly institutional quiet with an apparent hierophanic surplus of being, Mac performs a larger-than-life role for the lifeless inmates, who crave a sense-making story that demands of them no personal change. While Kesey's culture-hero suffers initially from no explicit “Christ complex” like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, McMurphy revels in his personal pop mythology, which stretches from the American past of the legendary logger, “the swaggering gambler, the big red-headed brawling Irishman,” to the present of Superman, Captain Marvel, the Lone Ranger on “the TV set walking down the middle of the street to meet a dare” (189). Relishing himself as an emblem of “transcendent human possibility,” in Terry G. Sherwood's phrase, Randle Patrick McMurphy at first takes on the lineaments of a “mythic Christ.” Sherwood argues that the simplistic moral oppositions this heroic design requires prevent Kesey's novel from being a serious work; the book projects, like the comic strip, a world only as it ought to be (96-100). If Cuckoo's Nest remained thus enclosed in this pop-mythic pattern, it would indeed risk indulging a self-deceptively simple morality, for the sake of popular entertainment or counter-propaganda. But the “cartoon world … where the figures are flat and outlined in black,” as Bromden calls it (31), is not Kesey's vision: it is his paranoid narrator's delusion. This structure must be broken if the whole saving story is to be lived and told.

As the Indian's “primitive” religious imagination suggests, the attraction of the McMurphy hero as a “giant come out of the sky to save us from the Combine” is rooted in the appeal of ancient myth to a sick man terrified of formlessness. As his narrative opens, Bromden sets the stage for nothing less than the primordial struggle between dragon and sky-god (Tiamat and Marduk, Cetus and Perseus) that in myths of the beginnings establishes the world (Symbolic Action 383).³ Miss Ratched, who can blow herself up to more than human size in the Indian's imagination is the center of an evil technological priestcraft; sitting “in the center of [a] web of wires like a watchful robot” (26), she inhabits a mechanical dragon's lair, where this female version of the “beast that was, and is not, and yet is” is as ontologically elusive as the dragon of the Apocalypse, to which Kesey refers in the novel's dedication. The head nurse of the ward is an opponent truly worthy of the larger-than-life McMurphy.

But the power of these opposing mythic terms must be diminished if the narrator is to get well. The archetypal enemy, the Combine, must be defeated as an idea (myth) because, representing all the ways “these things can be rigged” (27), it licenses Bromden's paranoid conviction that he is a victim who can at least play “deaf and dumb” safely in this enclosed fantasy. Bromden's image of his Champion as immortal hero must also diminish, change into mortal shape. The Indian puzzles over the logic of two possible answers to the question of identity: If Mac is One who “came out of the sky” he is surely the superhuman rescuer from the mythic Combine; but if Mac is “merely” human, surely he cannot save. Mac's continued presence in the institution as a real man who “is what he is” gradually subverts the Indian's imaginary world that dictates these false choices—these binary oppositions that prevent him from accepting the far more ambiguous, unfixed terms of historical experience. McMurphy comes to Bromden as parable by reversing these expectations: he is a “mere man” who redeems the time, rescuing other men not by touching down briefly in their world as a superhuman force, but by deeply enmeshing himself in their suffering experience. It is only as McMurphy becomes less mythic to the inmates and to himself that he can rescue them from the comfortable nest of their delusions and empower them to be what they are in the world as it is.

Understanding the structure of these transformations is essential for seeing what kind of “Christ figure” McMurphy is and is not. Students of this novel have noticed many of Kesey's deliberate parallels drawn from the life of Christ. It is peculiarly appropriate, however, that these historical parallels “begin to emerge only in the last quarter of the book,” as Theodore Ziolkowsky has observed (266, n. 19).⁴ For by then Mac has moved away from his initial position as an ahistorical “mythic Christ” to become another kind of authentic messiah in human time. Just as Christ crucified, the Parable of God in the gospels, subverted the expectations of his world through the power of his weakness and the wisdom of his foolishness (I Cor. 1:20-25), so the parabolic McMurphy scandalizes the prevailing idolatries by succeeding ever more recklessly through failure, breaking Bromden's self-enclosing myth and becoming a parable for the men; he risks being martyred in the cause of his friends' liberation and is resurrected through the new life he brings to his followers—not, however, as a mythic Jesus or “Christ dream,” but as a just and compassionate fellow human being. But he is no Son of God reincarnate in fiction; the Christlike pattern is complicated by the reality of his own resurgent sinning. If McMurphy becomes saving as he becomes parable for others, the others are also a needed parable for him. And McMurphy, unlike Nathanael West's false messiah, is willing to be parabled.

This is the central double reversal in the novel; but Cuckoo's Nest overturns expectations more than once, and in more than one way. The mutual transformations of the men and of Mac are effected not by a single dramatic shift but, on a much more closely discriminated scale, through the repeated alternations of two distinctive forms of story logic. Again and again in the narrative, parable (with its dynamic open structure of advent/reversal/action) breaks the perfect designs of resurgent popular myth (with its rounded closure), exposing the provisionality of story. This repeated dialectic eventually forms a pattern in the novel that makes moral and existential sense out of the discontinuities, regressions, dreamlike sequences, disjointed flashbacks, clearer memories, and stretches of forward-moving action that constitute the narrative complexity of Kesey's work. Each time parabolic breakage occurs, expectations are overturned, values are redefined, plans are changed, emotional security is upset, and fresh action is forwarded for a while until the delusive certainties of the men's and McMurphy's myths reassert their old seductions. These alternations in the action are accompanied by the actual storytelling of myths and parables, with their different rhetorical situations and effects. And yet, even though the narrative movement of Cuckoo's Nest depends upon the breakdown of stories that foster mere acquiescence, Kesey remains tolerant of the human need for legends and mythic play-acting as his characters live through the pain of coming to awareness. This tolerance I do not sense in Crossan's treatment of myth. More usefully, Kenneth Burke writes that along with efforts to change the structure of society

must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps us to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the “pure” or “acquiescent” art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people.

(Literary Form 322)

For such reasons does the heroic McMurphy legend linger through the last pages of the novel. But it is embedded in Kesey's dynamic fictional world of provisional stories that undergo continual reformulation; and in the concluding paragraphs, myth does not have the final word.

Even at the novel's opening when Mac is most celebratively identified with popular mythology, his parabolic potential for the men is evident. With his unexpected laughter and songs, he threatens “the whole smoothness of the outfit” (39), as though he were pure subversion aiming at “simply the actual disruption of the ward for the sake of disruption” (25). After the first group therapy session, Mac unsettles the inmates' theories of Big Nurse as either the “tender angel of mercy, Mother Ratched” or as “the juggernaut of modern matriarchy” (58, 68) and sets out to expose the seams of her myth: he is going to “Bug her till she comes apart at those neat little seams, and shows, just one time, she ain't so unbeatable as you think” (72). By the end of Part I he has done it, but the reversal and new action come not quite in the way anyone expects.

Mac's small successes in early skirmishes with Big Nurse are entertaining, but he cannot diminish her power by his own pop-myth performances: he must first change the men's image of themselves. (As Crossan says: “It takes two to parable” [Interval 87]). Mac then tries to teach these losers that they can “win” at the gaming table; to their myth of total failure, he opposes the antimyth of capitalistic success. But an antimyth does not disturb the hearer's structure of expectation; and this one is only another version of the institution's myth of the powerful against the weak. Besides, the men play only for paper money and a poker-table peripety. When the odds are seriously against them in a real power-game (as in the first vote on the World Series), the men back down. What they must learn is a different kind of heroic winning that challenges the myths of power and gain by transforming the meaning of failure.

An unexpected parabolic event points this way when McMurphy, typically inviting bets and bragging of his legendary strength, tries to lift the control panel in the tub room. No emblem of transcendent possibility now or a TV hero, Mac shows himself a man with a body shaken by strain who has the courage to try even though “he knows he can't lift it,” even though “everybody knows he can't” (121). Mac thus begins to take on the lineaments of a new kind of “gambling fool.” As the inmates' images of him change, the way is opened for their expectations of themselves to change, and for action on their discovery that risking oneself is also a way of succeeding as a human being.

This acted parable has almost immediate results on the men Mac has been “trying to pull … out of the fog” (132). Their second, successful vote on the baseball game, a gesture of independence from ward policy, initiates a rapid series of reversals, losses, and gains. By the time the outraged Ratched comes apart, making her lose control has become much less important than the men's gain of a new structure of expectations. Better than actually watching the old World Series on television, the men “see” a new “world”—their new communal assertion and collective laughter. And now Mac sits next to an empty TV screen, entertaining them not with pop-culture antics in place of TV's mass media fantasies but with parabolic stories: true accounts of efforts to win that had turned out losses which Mac laughs at now, and stories about losers who, even “blindfolded and backwards,” had defeated the expected winners (152). As Part I closes, the Indian has ventured outside the enclosure of his fantasy to see the whole absurd scene objectively and to laugh at it. If his hero has out-witted an enemy, the victory has come not on the terms of myth but on the unsettling terms of parable. Bromden's willingness to be thus parabled signals his capacity for healing—and for telling the whole story.

Part II begins by working out the ironies of a nice counterpoint: Nurse Ratched seeks now to expose the seams of McMurphy's myth (“a Napoleon, a Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun”) with an antimyth that this “mere man” will sooner or later prudently enclose himself in self-interest (146); meanwhile, Mac's actual generous presence on the ward as a mere man has an increasingly salutary effect on his “buddies.” Even with the tragic results of Mac's temporary defection in Part II, when he retreats self-protectively and a disillusioned Cheswick lunges into the deep water to his death, we see Mac's lasting influence as parable for the men: they still gaze at him with a look “like they wished things didn't have to be this way” (165). And just when they have nearly given up on their champion, he breaks their structure of expectations again by recklessly running his hand through the Nurse's spotless window. By this foolish gamble, Mac risks not financial loss or limited physical pain as before, but permanent commitment in an institution for the insane.

The works that follow this perilous victory are his increasingly daring therapies for the men, culminating in the fishing trip. Their biggest risk, the journey repays them with both successes and failures as they learn to laugh at the chaos they make in their struggles with the deep. By Part III McMurphy has grown to be considerably more real than an emblem of sheer transcendence. That complexity is now reflected in the unfolding of Bromden's fuller humanity as a courageous and compassionate human being. Already Mac has made the Indian “bigger” in personal power than his fatalistic fantasies had allowed, but such power carries with it the danger of psychopathy; Bromden's consciousness as a social being must be empowered too. Appropriately, this expansion is not manifested in clear vision alone, which might still imply the passive attitude of a wise but uninvolved onlooker; awareness, as Burrell and Hauerwas observe, is more like speaking than like seeing. In Part III what Bromden discovers is that he must talk to save himself and others. He must venture out of the fog to name his experience in the existentially open territory of dialogue. Parable, which depends upon a dynamic relation between teller and listener in a way myth does not, helps to prepare Bromden for this engagement with others in the fluid space of social relationships.

Bromden's first social challenge is the reconstruction of his personal story for another. McMurphy helps the Chief to find his voice by telling a boyhood story of his own about the “worth” of speaking out despite its material “cost” (206-7). Bromden acts on this surprising parable by talking about his own past and discovers that for the loss of what is not true in his myth of the White Man's exploitation and the Red Man's total weakness, he gains both sympathy and judgment from his listener. McMurphy is there to question, to ask for clarifications, to object, to empathize through dialogue as well as through story that is dialogical. Dialogue and dialectic clarify and refine thought; and during a silence when Bromden is arguing internally, he follows the sequence he has learned through speaking with another person, three times making a statement, questioning it, correcting it, and affirming a restatement, working toward a truer account of his history (210). Yet their midnight talk ends in fantasies as McMurphy spins a yarn about a wild Heaven in which Bromden is the superlatively sexual hero. The Indian needs such stories, mingled with the laughter that acknowledges their provisionality, as old expectations of himself are reversed and he works toward clearer consciousness.

With the spoken word, Bromden's narrative in real time properly can be said to begin. His action in open time—with an uncertain future—flows from this point in the novel. His first words had been an involuntary “Thank you” for a stick of gum: speaking also brings Bromden out into the world of others where there are both gifts and demands. Much earlier in the book, the befogged and paralyzed cigar-store Indian had seen faces floating by asking him for help: “I can't do nothing for you either, Billy,” he had imagined himself saying. “You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. … Put your face away, Billy” (131). Nevertheless, the faces had kept “filing past”—for, as Martini (hallucinating bodies in the showers) says, “They need you to see thum” (176). Bromden has been trying to put the faces away by making them into mere signs that read “I'm tired” or “I'm dying of a bum liver” (131). The impact of McMurphy's parabolic presence is to liberate the faces from these signs so that they take on fully human dimensions for the Indian, who also gains a face of his own that is no longer trapped screaming behind mirrors. As his narrative in open time begins, Bromden sheds mythological thinking to become a human being present for others.

In Part IV as the men return toting salmon like “conquering heroes,” Mac threatens to turn back again into myth, into a friend too good to be true, like Jesus or Santa Claus (243-49). Big Nurse determines to destroy the men's new heroism by launching her final attack on the McMurphy legend, whose terms have significantly shifted from “Attila the Hun” to “martyr” and “saint” (252). Harding offers a weak defense with the demoralizing theory that there are neither gifts nor givers but only “the dear old capitalistic system of free individual enterprise, comrades,” and its “good old red, white, and blue hundred-percent American con man” (254). This “whole bit” is not adequate to explain their friend; and the cynical Harding desperately needs more. But as the men ask, “What's in it for ol' Mack?” (250), McMurphy re-enacts the opportunistic role of “Nobody's fool” with which he has been charged, and the capitalistic counter-myth seems to be winning again.

The men's mythic expectations are once more shattered when Mac steps forward to defend a vulnerable inmate from the cruel pranks of the aides. The importance of this moment as parable for the men is underscored by Bromden's response. By joining Mac in a fray which neither can finally win, Bromden shows that he has gained the compassion to identify with others' losses, as well as the courage to throw himself into an open situation “without thinking about being cagey or safe or what would happen to me,” thinking only about “the thing that needed to be done and the doing of it” (258).

Reversal has led to action, and when the action is punished by Electroshock Treatment, the impact of the parable is not lost. In the foggy aftermath, it is by reordering fragments of his past largely in parabolic patterns that Bromden painfully reconstructs his identity toward the clear moment of his full awakening. The hunting incident with his father which he recalls, the memory of his white mother's challenge to the old Indian ways, and the stories of his grandmother's life/death/resurrection follow in his mind as a lifelike sequence of losses and gains, the ambiguous contradictions he must face in his continued living (271-75). When he emerges as an openly speaking and hearing member of the human community after this, the Chief is capable of his own liberation.

As the men's transformation in the background and Bromden's in the foreground show, the combat at the heart of Cuckoo's Nest is not simply, as it first appears, the opposition of Champion and Enemy (the sky-god myth), or People against the Institution and Machine (the Combine myth), or the Weak against the Strong (Harding's rabbit myth), although these conflicts are anchored in real power relations in the book. The central conflict is between the men's endemic tendencies toward self-deception and their capacities for generating truer, more adequate stories about themselves and their world. And just as parable is “story grown self-conscious and self-critical” (Interval 57), so Bromden's dialectically constructed narrative increasingly becomes aware of itself. While he does not simply demythologize McMurphy's story—for remnants of legend linger in the descriptions of Mac's last performances—the transformed narrator's very awareness that the pop myths are broken testifies to the saving power of Mac's parable for his friends.

In Cuckoo's Nest, master and disciples become transformed in the encounter with each other. The men are also an “advent” for McMurphy that turns his familiar world upside down and challenges him to new and unforeseen acts. Mac too needs to be parabled: the protective “cartoon world” of his shallow individualist persona must be transformed if he is to enter the multidimensional human community. The sign of his grace is that McMurphy is open to the reconstitution of his image and to the lesson of limit, indeed to the lesson of his own mortality.

Introducing himself through his master-image—“McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I'm a gambling fool”—he does not at all hide the fact that he has come not to be a sacrifice but to “trim you little babies like little lambs” (11-12). A “smart gambler,” Mac plans to “look the game over awhile before [drawing him]self a hand” (47). But the game he sees is not what he expects. Although he has begun in the spirit of enterprise he later laughs at “how funny the whole thing is” (113); and by the end of Mac's first parabolic encounter with the men, he feels “he's been trapped some way” (69). The surprising, crazy story of the patients' utter defeat forces him to listen to their expressions of suffering, and he watches Harding with “puzzled wonder … like it's the first human face he ever laid eyes on” (60). After the first revelatory group therapy session, he begins examining his values and later dreams night after night not of signs but of individual faces.

Mac keeps drifting back into old games of self-interest even as he moves toward his redemption from that capitalistic world. His first savior role is the perfect “con” (getting what he wants while making others think they are getting what they want): he will become the Champion of this pitiful circle without taking risks, by gambling on a sure thing. Ironically, this is his disciples' own game of self-protection (78). In Part II the tables are turned on him: by coming to him like he is “some kind of savior,” he says, without warning him of the “risk [he] was running,” the men have “conned ol' R. P. McMurphy.” Stepping right out of this deep water, he tells his buddies: “You got to swallow your pride sometimes and keep an eye out for old Number One” (182). Yet he cannot achieve insensibility to the men's continuing need. Nor can he find a harmonizing explanation for their shocking news that they are voluntary inmates: this scandal to his winning principle he cannot “seem to get straight in [his] mind” (185). If Mac is to be saved and saving, he must, as the resident doctors say, “give up his bit,” reverse his master-image, and become a “gambling fool” who wins by losing. When he runs his hand through the glass at the end of Part II, he breaks his own self-encapsulation in an individualist myth; the man dedicated to “gambling on all levels” has escalated the perils and redefined the meaning of his vocation.

That he has not entirely disengaged himself from the gambler's dream of gain is evident yet in Part IV when McMurphy exploits Bromden's new physical strength by persuading the men to bet on it. When Bromden scruples to refuse his share of the winnings, the baffled McMurphy asks, “Now what's the story?” His comrade steps in as parable: “We thought it wasn't to be winning things …” (257). In the next critical scene, Mac acts on Bromden's “story” by defending the helpless George from the cruel aides, just as Bromden acts on the parable Mac has been for him. The ring of expectant faces goads McMurphy to make an irrevocable choice against the remnants of his master-image, for he knows he cannot finally win. As his “helpless, cornered despair” (261) forecasts, he seems to know that this event will lead him to give his last gift, his life.

Thinking forward to the end of the story, Bromden muses that “It was like he'd signed on for the whole game and there wasn't any way of him breaking his contract” (296). In this new “world series,” McMurphy had also been signed on and the stakes are very high. The suicides of Cheswick and Billy Bibbitt are sobering proof that Mac has risked, as Nurse says, “Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives”; but it is not, as she further charges, because Mac thinks himself “to be a God!” (304). For her psychopath theory is only another version of her dream of manipulation. It also implies an inadequate conception of deity as transcendent power, rather than as the paradoxical God of the Bible who requires sacrifice and is himself the satisfying sacrificial love—that courageous compassion which Mac has in his imperfect way imparted to the others because he has risked participating in their reality. Now, his last desperate gamble with his own life is an act of justice as well as an act of love that consummates his incarnation from mythic into mortal shape, an obedience unto death for the friends “making him do it” (304).

Billy's suicide is a harrowing parabolic event that launches Mac's final reversal. It also shows us that the revolution of consciousness which we have attended through the book is not in itself enough. Hearing Nurse's self-legitimizing explanation moments after Billy's death, Mac instantaneously grasps the reality of human limit: people are not inviolable, and institutional stories have real power over people's lives. Billy's self-deception had been an enemy, but Nurse Ratched is an enemy too, not just a paranoid projection. McMurphy's lunge to strangle her makes a frontal attack on an institutional lie, tackling the larger structure of untruth which has victimized Billy and in which the Nurse plays the leading role. Accepting his parable, McMurphy is drawn swiftly to his death. The men, accepting theirs, venture out not at all assured of their futures, but strong enough to try living their lives outside the mythic entrapments of the institution.

Bromden's triumphant leap from the asylum with all the symbolic force of a resurrection from the tomb may seem to turn the parable of McMurphy back into myth. But Kesey does not perfect the form of his story by harmonizing all the contradictions his work has raised. His conclusion is poised on a paradox of death/life that opens up the story for the survivors; and some of the remaining details and ambiguities suggest a conclusion appropriate to the dynamic provisionality of all the novel's storytelling and to its own narrative structure.

Bromden's escape coalesces two opposed images that have been kept separate through most of the book: images of lifting associated with mythical transcendence (only a hero of legendary strength could have lifted the control panel that Bromden lifts) and images of shattering associated with parabolic breakage (only one who now sees himself as human can shatter this prison and enter the contingent human world). The event occasioned by lifting and shattering is both transcendental and descendental: he flies, he falls. “The glass splashed out in the moon, like a bright cold water baptizing the sleeping earth,” he writes (310). Joyously celebrating beauty, he is also reminded, with deliberate invocation of the sacrament, that one enters a new life by being baptized into a death.

As the narrative nearly slips back into myth, Bromden nonetheless goes on to show us that he has entered no legendary life outside the contingencies of human time; rather, in his ending he is finally aware of himself as a temporal being. The entrapping mythic present of his opening paranoid formula, “They're out there,” has been replaced by the sense of the past now measured and assessed: “I been away a long time” (311). Leading up to these last words, he thinks through his plans in the closing paragraphs and imagines that the world he will encounter is neither entirely in the grip of a Combine conspiracy nor better than it really is. Aiming to “look over the country” in order to “bring some of it clear” in his mind, Bromden heads toward whatever is “out there”—the tragedy of Indians who have “drunk themselves goofy” and the comic absurdity of Indians spearing salmon again in the dam's spillway—in the provisional, surprising world (311).

Bromden heads toward the highway “in the direction I remembered seeing the dog go” to hitch a ride toward home (310). The memory recalls Bromden's first time at the symbolic window in an important prefiguring scene that had mingled threat with promise. In the tranquil autumn night, a flock of Canada honkers were crossing the moon, led by one that looked like “a black cross opening and closing.” When the geese pass out of sight, a dog continues loping in their direction “steady and solemn like he had an appointment.” A car's headlights loom; Bromden sees the “dog and the car making for the same spot of pavement.” What had happened next he never knew, for he had been taken away from the window (156-57).

Recalling this earlier passage is an appropriate way for Kesey to open the end of his novel. Bromden will have to live in the tensions that have moved his narrative forward, with its combat between closed and open forms of living and of telling and with its many conflicts between disillusion and believing, sin and regeneration, dying and living. Kesey's work has a complex structure with many crossings and re-crossings, most fundamentally a dialectic between the tragic and the comic in a tale of loss and gain. Across its moon flies not a sky-god, transcendent and distantly beautiful, but a black cross, opening and closing, moving into the dark.

Notes

1. I am indebted to Professor Walter R. Bouman for his paper, “Piety in a Secularized Society,” read at Valparaiso University in 1977, which called my attention to “Self-Deception and Autobiography …” and to John Dominic Crossan.

2. The adequacy of Crossan's definition of parable to describe the actual parabolē of Jesus has been debated. See, for example, Semeia 1 (1974) and John Cobb. Whatever its technical limitations of applicability to the gospel stories, however, Crossan's understanding of parabolic story and action does accord with the design in the gospels of Jesus as the Parable of God and, in Kesey's novel, of McMurphy's story.

   Parabolē encompasses many kinds of figurative language; although metaphor is part of the event of Jesus' parables through which consciousness is transformed, I do not treat metaphoric structure in this essay.

3. Burke cites ten elements from the earliest known type of “combat myth” which are present in the opening episodes of Cuckoo's Nest.

4. See also David M. Graybeal and George M. Boyd.

Works Cited

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Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

———. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

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