Chapter 6 (by Charlotte)

Chapter 6:


“One Christmas at midnight on the button . . . in comes a fat man with a beard, eyes ringed red by the cold and his nose just the color of a cherry. . .The black boys move in with the flashlights.  They kept him with us six years before they discharged him, clean-shaven and skinny as a pole.”(70)
This quote is important to the book because it shows how being in the ward can take everything away from you including your beliefs.  The man in this quote is supposed to be Santa Clause and when he enters the ward he his jolly old self that everyone knows him to be.  When he leaves the ward he is “shaven and skinny as a pole.”  Which is showing that being in the ward strips the patients of everything that defies them.  Once they leave that have no spirit and have lost who they are.  


“You see that’s a recording playing up there, my friend.  We seldom hear the radio.  The world news might not be therapeutic.  And we’ve all heard that recording so many times now it simply slides out of our hearing, the way the sound of a waterfall soon because an unheard sound to those who live near it.  Do you think if you lived near a waterfall you could hear it very long?”(73)
Harding says this to McMurphy when McMurphy starts to get annoyed with the constant playing of the radio over the loud speakers.  None of the other patients are bothered by the light music because it has become  familiar for them, and it just blends in with whatever else is going on.  This shows that their day never changes and they never get to hear or experience anything knew.  Also they are in isolation by not being able to see what is on the news and what is going on in the world around them.  The patients do not have control on their life, and are almost like the Big Nurse’s prisoners. 


“And throws his head back and laughs out loud at the way the guys hustle to get their bets down.  That laugh banged around the day room all evening, and all the time he was dealing he was joking and trying to get the player to laugh alone with him.  But they were all afraid to loosen up; it’d been too long.”(74)
I thought that this quote was important to the book because it shows how all of the patients are scared to be who they are, and loosen up and have fun.  The whole time that they have been admitted they have been told to me be people other than who they really were.  In the end I believe that this has effected them more than their actual condition, and the only way that they would be able to get better would be if people accepted them for who they were and never pressured them to be someone different.