Fear in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Scarlet Letter

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Scarlet Letter To Live With Fear

To live with fear and not be overcome by it is the final test of

maturity. This test has been "taken" by various literary characters. Chief

Bromden in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Reverend Arthur

Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter both appear to have taken and

passed this test.

It first seemed as though the Chief was going to fail this test of

maturity in the mental ward that he was committed to. He had locked

himself up by acting deaf and dumb. He had immense fear of the "Combine,"

or society, that ruined things and people and treated them like machines,

giving orders and controlling them. Soon enough to "save" the Chief,

McMurphy arrived. He was lively, and not scared; the complete opposite of

the Chief. This courage eventually passed on to the Chief. At a meeting,

when McMurphy was holding a vote to prove that the patients wanted to see

the World Series, the Chief voted for it. At first he said that McMurphy

controlled his hand. Later on he admitted that it was he who raised it.

He even talked to McMurphy one night, and began laughing at the situation

at hand. One day when McMurphy and the Chief tried to help another patient

who was being taken advantage of by orderlies, they were caught and

sentenced to electro-shock therapy (EST). The Chi usually blacked out in a

fog when confronted with problems; however, this time (he had endured over

200 EST sessions previously) he did not. However, McMurphy was

deteriorating, and the two seemed to be reversing positions. McMurphy

eventually was sentenced to a lobotomy, which left him as a helpless,

pathetic person, as the Chief had once been. The Chief now had the courage

to put McMurphy out of his misery, despite what the head nurse, Nurse

Ratched, the symbol of the combine to the Chief, would do to him. He

smothered McMurphy, and afterwards, escaped by lifting the control panel,

which McMurphy told him that he could lift but the Chief saw himself as

"small," a symbol of his strength against the combine, and breaking a