An Unlikely Christ Figure

He's an amalgamation of the romanticized American Male Hero: part John Wayne/Errol Flynn the Cowboy Hero and part Wild Bill Hickok the Gambler. He's a little bit Captain Marvel with his Shazam! superhero power. But he's very, very, wild and unruly, on the wrong side of the law and "all that's decent" morality, too. Jumping from the secular to the spiritual, Kesey makes what seems to be an almost sacrilegious comparison to Jesus Christ: the "fisher of men" and "savior" remarks, the leading of the 12 men to the ocean to fish, the consorting with prostitutes, etc. Chief wanting to touch the sleeping McMurphy recalls the sick woman from Mark 5 who wants to touch Jesus. There will be MUCH, MUCH, MORE.

Here's the Chief in  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: He [McMurphy] didn’t say anything after that for so long I [Chief} thought he’d gone to sleep. I wished I’d told him good night. I looked over at him, and he was turned away from me. His arm wasn’t under the covers, and I could just make out the aces and eights tattooed there. It’s big, I thought, big as my arms used to be when I played football. I wanted to reach over and touch the place where he was tattooed, to see if he was still alive. He’s layin’ awful quiet, I told myself, I ought to touch him to see if he’s still alive. ... That’s a lie. I know he’s still alive. That ain’t the reason I want to touch him. I want to touch him because he’s a man.

Now the woman in Mark 5:25-29 (New International Version): A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.  When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,  because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed." Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers made a wonderful song called "Touch the Hem of His Garment" about the Bible passage. Listen to it here.

Don't be upset by all of the contradictions and complexities of how Kesey presents his Hero, who is not so heroic at times. Question the contradictions. After Kesey's McMurphy, it became a Sixties stock story to find "heroes in the seaweed" (from a Leonard Cohen song called Suzanne) and Christ figures in jail (movie called Cool Hand Luke). Modern counterculture-influenced musicals like Jesus Christ, Superstar and Godspell brought Christ to Broadway.

As likable as McMurphy may be, he's sometimes just as despicable. He is, after all, just a man, not God. In spite of this, don't underestimate his sacrifice.

The novel isn't as "easy" as the movie, which tends to go for the belly laughs at the expense of the patients. With McMurphy's flaws more pronounced in the book, Kesey challenges us to hate the sin but love the sinner, especially when the sinner protects, empowers, and sacrifices himself for the helpless. There are "heroes in the seaweed," indeed.