threatening to expose the events to his mother. This plan disastrously backfires as Billy commits suicide. Nurse Ratched sees an opportunity to win the control battle by blaming McMurphy for Billys death and she makes her move. I hope youre finally satisfied. Playing with human lives gambling with human lives as if you thought yourself to be a God! (Kesey, 266) This is the last straw for a furious McMurphy. He believes that he controls Nurse Ratched and he must make a final stand for all the patients. He does not realize that he lost control over the ward when Billy died. He attacks her and succeeds in literally exposing what she really is to the other men, which permanently takes away what little control over the others that the Nurse still possessed. McMurphy believes that his control over Nurse Ratched is now absolute. This drastically distorted perception of his control falls apart, as his victory does not come without a tremendous price. He is taken away and lobotomized. McMurphy loses as much, if not more control than Nurse Ratched lost. When he returns to ward, Nurse Ratched puts him on display in a hopeless attempt to reinstall her control and fear into the hearts of the patients. The men are not at all influenced by this, for they all are now influenced and controlled by only themselves. (Semino and Swindlehurst, 1996) The Chief suffocates and kills McMurphy to put him out of his misery just before he takes control of his own destiny and escapes from the ward.After McMurphys lobotomy and death, the patients eventually begin to work together; some leave the ward while others stand up to the no longer so powerful and controlling Nurse Ratched. Although he received the harshest punishment imaginable, McMurphy showed the other patients that it was possible to beat the seemingly invincible Big Nurse. McMurphy helped change the lives of most of the men on the ward, when it seemed they were in a situation were ch...
