Lauren, to add onto your comment about Finny’s second incident, I feel that Gene was the one who was blamed because of the past events. I liked the way that you phrased how Gene was innocent in the second incident, but I think that this accusation that Finny put on Gene was not literal. I think that Finny was hurt because Gene’s truth had been told to him by strangers instead of by Gene himself—if he had wanted, Gene could have told Finny about the truth from earlier on. However, I also believe that Gene was not 100% responsible for Finny’s death. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I would hold the other boys such as Brinker the most responsible for Finny’s condition because they had been oblivious to the fact that the two boys had moved on from that painstaking incident, but they still wanted to reopen their wounds for their personal enjoyment. Like you, I was also confused about Finny’s actions towards Gene’s confession. When Gene had tried to confess earlier in the story right after the first incident, Finny had dismissed the thought of his friend acting against him because he had trusted him.
If in our first book, The Chief had realized that by fooling the rest of the ward, we was wrong, then I think that the target of the Head Nurse’s anger may have shifted from Murphy to Bromden. The Head Nurse may have been humiliated for being convinced that Bromden was a liar because he had been able to trick them all into think that he was deaf and mute. It still puzzles me how the Chief had been able to trick the ward. One would think that since it is a medical facility, there would have been tests to find the patient’s real condition. To me, if a metal ward was not able to distinguish the factual evidence from reality, I would feel that they are slacking. Lauren, how would you feel if you were deceived by someone who worked with you?
Since this is our comparison post, I noticed that between the two books, the character developments of the main characters are very similar. I feel that in both cases, the main character was a sort of narrator who told the story of a friend or another peer through their perspective. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Bromden was a bystander where the actual action was happening by McMurphy and the nurse, and in our most recent reading, Finny was the one who had to endure all of the pain. I also noticed that the roles of both Finny and McMurphy had been alike—they both had some sort of potent personality. In the first book, McMurphy had gotten the rest of the ward to revolt against the powers of the Head Nurse and also to go on the dangerous outing. He had also been able to get the other patients to vote in favor of the schedule change so that the patients could watch baseball. In the second book, I feel that Finny’s personality allows him to get away with things because of the way he interacted with officials. For example, Finny was able to get other boys in the school to begin their personal training exercise by jumping off the tree. All-in-all, I think that these two boys were officially the type of people with a very strong leadership ability. Lauren, do you know of anyone like these characters in real life?
The strongest connection I found in terms of character development was between the Chief himself and Gene. They both somehow killed another important character in their individual story. In the first story, the chief and literally killed McMurphy by suffocating him in his sleep, while in the second book, Gene had killed Finny through shock. I understand that calling Gene a murder is an accusation, but his friend’s death was deeply connected to the way that Gene had acted around him. Personally, I would not have been able to live a day without the guilt of murder if I were in the place of these two characters. How would you feel if you were responsible for the death of a peer?
Although the characters were also very different (the most obvious differences between both pairs Gene and Bromden; and Finny and McMurphy, is that two of them were boys in high school and the other two were men in mental wards) they are also very similar to the way that they are portrayed in their stories. The similarities between both pairs of characters are so astonishing because we had picked these books with no knowledge of the story line.
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