One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (novel) - Main Characters

Main Characters

• Chief Bromden: The novel's half-American Native American narrator has been in the mental hospital since the end of World War II. Bromden pretends to be deaf and mute, and through this guise he becomes privy to many of the ward's dirtiest secrets.
  As a young man, the Chief was a high school football star, a college student, and a war hero. After seeing his father, a Native American chieftain, humiliated at the hands of the U. S. government and his (white) wife, Chief Bromden descends into clinical depression and begins hallucinating. Soon he is diagnosed with schizophrenia. He believes society is controlled by a large, mechanized system which he calls "The Combine."
  • Richard Gray, author of A History of American Literature, said that Bromden "supplies" the novel's "vision." Gray explains that Bromden's "eye" "sees the inner truth" and that Bromden "is an outsider, an innocent eye in a way like Huck Finn, but what he sees is far stranger, far more surreal." Gray explained that Bromden's vision "may not be literally true but it is symbolically so because, to quote Emily Dickinson again, "Much madness is divinest sense.""
• Randle McMurphy: A rebellious convict sent from a normal prison. He is guilty of battery and gambling. He had also been charged with, but never convicted of, statutory rape. McMurphy is transferred from a prison work farm to the hospital, thinking it will be an easy way to serve out his sentence in comfort. In the end, McMurphy turns violent against Nurse Ratched, costing him his freedom, his health, and his life.