One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Chapter Summary & Analysis | Part 1

Part 1 Summary

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest begins on a Monday morning. The morning cleaning crew at the mental hospital, the black boys, are finishing up their cleaning duties, hating every moment of their miserable jobs, the early hour, and the start of a new week of the mindless, vile drudgery of cleaning up after the mentally ill. The narrator is "Chief Broom," one of the inmates at the mental hospital. The Chief is a massive Native American man, who pretends to be deaf and mute. After some harassment by the cleaning crew, he is given a mop and told to get to work cleaning a spot.

Soon after he begins to mop, Nurse Ratched appears. She is the head nurse at the hospital, and when she catches the young black men talking in a group instead of cleaning, she begins to fly into a rage. The men are spared her...
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