Plot Summary Thus Far: McMurphy has done most of his rebellion against Nurse Ratched-organizing a fishing trip, breaking the glass of the Nurses’s station with his fist, and beating up one of the orderlies who sought to torture one of the patients after the fishing trip. In this fight in particular, Chief aids McMurphy, as he has completely broken the illusion that he can no longer talk or speak (in actions prior to this, such as speaking to McMurphy and voting for the fishing trip.) After this, both him and McMurphy are administered electroshock therapy. After this, McMurphy has a secret party on the ward with prostitutes, where he helps one of the Acute patients, Billy Bibbit, lose his virginity. Though McMurphy planned to escape the ward, he does not, as Nurse Ratched uses her ties with Billy’s mother to shame and guilt him for what he did and causes him to commit suicide. In rage after this, McMurphy assaults Nurse Ratched and is lobotomized. However, McMurphy’s rebellious influence spread to the men, as many of them either leave or stay on to ensure that the ward does not go back to the way it was. 

“The ward door opened, and the black boys wheeled in this Gurney with a chart at the bottom that said in heavy black letters, MCMURPHY, RANDLE P. POST-OPERATIVE. And below this was written in ink, LOBOTOMY. … We stood at the foot of the Gurney, reading the chart, then looked up to the other end at the head dented into the pillow, a swirl of red hair over a face milk-white except for the heavy purple bruises around his eyes. … I watched and tried to figure out what he would have done. I was only sure of one thing: he wouldn’t have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse [Nurse Ratched] could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system. I was sure of that. … The swelling had gone down enough in the eyes that they were open; they stared into the full light of the moon, open and undreaming, glazed from being open so long without blinking until they were like smudged fuses in a fuse box. I moved to pick up the pillow, and the eyes fastened on the movement and followed me as I stood up and crossed the few feet between the beds. 

The big, hard body had a tough grip on life. It fought a long time against having it taken away, flailing and thrashing around so much I finally had to lie full length on top of it and scissor the kicking legs with mine until I mashed the pillow into the face. I lay there on top of the body for what seemed days. Until the trashing stopped. Until it was still a while and had shuddered once and was still again. Then I rolled off. I lifted the pillow, and in the moonlight I saw the expression hadn’t changed from the blank, dead-end look the least bit, even under suffocation.”

(321-323)

While McMurphy suffers a fate worse than death, his inability to come back to consciousness after the lobotomy demonstrates his final defiance of the system. McMurphy’s vegetable-like state demonstrates the fate of men who refuse to adhere to and rebel against society’s expectations for men. McMurphy is notably different from the example of Maxwell Taber (“Is for you to spread our approved form of masculinity“) because Taber does submit to society after his lobotomy. The Big Nurse orders McMurphy to be lobotomized so that he can become an example, yet McMurphy defies this through not being physically capable of learning the standards of masculinity. McMurphy does not give in to society’s standards even after the physical manipulation of his body, which is a radical defiance of the system.

In addition, McMurphy is still able to escape the system itself due to this defiance. Chief reflects that he “watched and tried to figure out what [McMurphy] would have done”, meaning that the influence of McMurphy, and therefore McMurphy himself, is the driving force of freeing McMurphy from the system by death. Kesey’s argument is then that one of the ways in which men can escape these societally forced standards of male behavior is martyrdom. If McMurphy was left there by Chief, he would have been unable to function, a fear tactic for the Big Nurse to force other men to adhere to the standards of masculinity which McMurphy fought hard throughout the novel to not adhere to. If we consider the state of McMurphy from the beginning of the novel where he is a robust figure with “face and neck are the color of oxblood leather” (Kesey 13) and laughter in his eyes (Kesey 12), to a man with “a face milk-white” and eyes “open and undreaming” (Kesey 321), then to be kept in a state lobotomized is indeed one not worth living. This is ultimately why Chief kills him and subsequently makes him a martyr for men who do not adhere to the system. It is also obvious that McMurphy does not physically give up his all of his masculinity and vitality despite the physical manipulation of his mind through the lobotomy, as his “big, hard body had a tough grip on life”, and fights with Chief down to its very last breath. However, Kesey does offer a solution for men so that they do not end up martyrs like McMurphy, that is, trapped in the system with all life drained of them, living corpses with the only solution for them to escape being death (as emphasized by McMurphy’s expression remaining unchanged after he is strangled by Chief). That is that one must both wholeheartedly embrace their masculinity and physically escape the system by removing themself from it, which McMurphy fails to do after the death of Billy Bibbit, hence why he ends up a martyr.