able to organize a fishing trip and get the patients away from the ward and into the real world. They gain a sense of confidence from their journey and when they are fishing they ask for Mac’s help many times, but he refuses. He realizes that he can not always be there to do things for the patients and they must learn to help themselves. To be “cured they must become individuals and to do this they must go through new and different experiences on their own. At the end of the book the questions asked by the “patient” in the Waking are answered. What is there to know? The patients realize that living their life according to a strict schedule everyday is not really living. They have learned to question authority and live life based on individual decisions. McMurphy sums up what he has taught the patients by telling the Chief that you must look back at painful memories and laugh and look back at good memories and feel the pain and that really makes you the person that you are. The other question is who can tell us how. The answer is seemingly McMurphy, who points the patients in the right directions, but they really must tell themselves how. They must teach themselves to be independent by doing knew things and thinking on their own. In the end The Nurse, who runs the ward, gets the best of McMurphy and he ends up getting a lobotomy. The Chief, who has learned McMurphy’s lessons well, ends up killing McMurphy because he knows he can no longer gain experiences and be an individual. Therefore he is no longer a person and is not really considered alive. Once he suffocates McMurphy, the Chief and other patients leave the institution to gain their own experiences and live life as individual people. They now will learn by going where they want to go....
