one flew
Chief Bromden, the half-Indian narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, has been a patient in an Oregon psychiatric hospital for fifteen years. During this time, he has pretended to be deaf and dumb. When he was a child, three government officials came to see his father about buying the tribe's land so they could build a hydroelectric dam. Bromden, ten years old at the time, was home alone. When he tried to speak to them, they acted as if he weren't there, sowing the seeds for his withdrawal into himself. Bromden's white mother joined forces with some of the members of the tribe to pressure Bromden's father to sell the land. Bromden, like his father, is a big man who came to feel small and helpless. In the hospital, Bromden and several other male mental patients are under the domination of Nurse Ratched, a former army nurse who rules her ward with an iron hand. Like Bromden's mother, Ratched is a castrating female with a keen skill in making men ineffectual and weak.