Simple Machinery

As I read the book I noticed The Chief used machines many times to describe the Big Nurse and the people in the ward. However, it was not until I read further on that I saw that The Chief really believed people were machines and had nothing inside except for “rust, ashes wire or glass” (pg. 79). I believe Kesey is symbolizing human behavior and society with machines. There is no soul, no real feelings: just detached material things.

The machines symbolize society in the sense of the routine all people who are part of the conformist society have. They have a schedule and an order of things, so when things go differently in the ward the Chief blames it on an error on the machinery:

“Whatever it was went haywire in the mechanism, they’ve just about got it fixed again. The clean calculated arcade movement is coming back.” (Pg. 155)

For me this not only shows how society is a machine, but how we are machines that follow this routine and if something goes wrong with it ,we fail too. It’s like if we were part of a factory and society was the “parent” machine that kept us going, if it fails we fail with it.

I believe it is already clear that the hospital is a small-scale model of society in which the Big Nurse is the ultimate authority. The Big Nurse, in page 6, is described as a doll, something with no feelings, only a mechanical object. She would be the main machine from which the others operate. The patients, more specifically the chronics, are individual machines that can’t operate on their own because they “are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired”. However, these flaws are only flaws in societies’ eyes. They symbolize the structure that society makes people follow, and when someone doesn’t conform with it they are seen as crazy or as defective machines. Does this mean the patients are really crazy? Or are they just don’t conform with society’s standards, and have a different way of following them?

In other words, they are really machines that have a different way of operating because their wiring is different from what is commonly known.