she sits behind the window at her control panel and sometimes it could last hours on end (75). So with all the control she has over the ward the patients really feel pressured to do what ever she says. The one thing that Nurse Ratched has control of that really hurts the Combine is laughter. As Porter says, everybody sees Miss Ratched as a machine and not as a human. They think she is dehumanized herself along with them. To Bromden the tip of each finger was the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like the tip of a sodering iron (Kesey 4) (49). Bromden and all the other patients on the ward are not thought of as human beings. Miss Ratched thinks of them as just objects or pieces of machinery, so she treated them like pieces of machinery. With structure and control a playing a big part in the daily lives of the men on the ward, Miss Ratched does not see how the pressure of her control and wanting a structured environment had an negative mental effect on the patients. Bromden does not have that free laugh. As with McMurphy, Bromdens therapist he had a laugh with no resistance. Porter says, The inability to laugh therefore is a gauge of the combines pressure... (97). The patients on the ward never just laugh loosely because they feel the pressure of Nurse Ratched when she is sitting behind the glass window of her office looking at them. With the resistance to laugh Bromden also could not smell the usual things that normal men can smell. All that he could smell was the oil from the machines and the heated machinery (Porter 30). He could not only smell the machines, he often hallucinated allot about them also. Sometimes he would see machines in his room at night when everybody else was asleep. The chief is a comic character who literally sees microphones in the broom handles, wires in the walls, and pernicious devices in the electric shavers (Wallace 8). Bromden at this point is not human. Leeds says the Combine, committed as it is to the...
