One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Part I, Chapter Twelve Summary

  • A visiting doctor is addressing the residents when Chief comes past, sweeping the floor.
  • He pushes the broom past a picture that Public Relation brought to the ward a while back. It’s a picture of a man fly-fishing in the mountains. Chief can practically smell the snow and feel the cold wind that the fisherman is experiencing.
  • Chief says it’s so easy to forget what it was like at the old hospital, when they didn’t have nice images like this on the walls for you to "climb into" and lose yourself. Basically, this ward is a step up from that last place, where there was no TV, just walls and chairs and confinement jackets.
  • Public Relation says that they’ve "come a long way" since those old, awful hospitals. Now things are so nice that a person would have to be crazy to want to run away.
  • In the staff room, the skinny visiting doctor is shivering as if he were in the freezing cold. Chief thinks that maybe the doctor also feels the snow and cold wind from the picture.