The major themes of the novel by far are authority, trust, and distrust. McMurphy spends the majority of the book questioning and challenging Nurse Ratched’s authority, and eventually gains his own power, in a sense, over the other patients in the institution. He has no respect for authority except his own, and does not approve of the dictatorship of the Big Nurse. For such a rebellious person, McMurphy is surprisingly considerate. Even when everyone is against Harding, he attempts to make conversation and speak to the man. Chief Bromden, Billy Bibbit, Cheswick, Sefelt, they all respect McMurphy because he treats them like his equals. As the story progresses, they begin to stray from Nurse Ratched’s abuse of power and realize their strength in numbers under…show more content… One of the clearest things to see from the beginning of the book is that the narrator, as with many other characters, has an unreliable perspective. Chief suffers from hallucinations and often flashes back to his childhood and incidents with his father. He believes himself to be physically small because he feels small under the iron fist of the Big Nurse. He watched Bancini’s hand morph into a ball and chain long before he let a punch throw one of the black boys across the room. Some patients are schizophrenic, others are pathological liars, but the point of all of them being in a mental institution is that no one really knows what is going on in their heads—not even themselves. Despite this, by the end of the fishing trip, the group had amassed quite a bit of trust in each other, and had developed bonds. Chief even feels comfortable enough to reveal to McMurphy that he is not, in fact, deaf or dumb, but that he understands everything going on around him. And McMurphy takes it well. The men in the institution all band together, proving their trust in each other to win the World Series as well as the fishing
