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Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Keep Acting:
In Part Three, Bromden wants to sign up for McMurphy's fishing expedition but is afraid to do so because of the dramatic irony he has maintained so long around his hearing. He is amused by the situational irony:
[I]t’d show I’d been hearing everything else that’d been said in confidence around me for the past ten years. And if the Big Nurse found out about that, that I’d heard all the scheming and treachery that had gone on when she didn’t think anybody was listening, she’d hunt me down with an electric saw, fix me where she knew I was deaf and dumb. Bad as I wanted to go, it still made me smile a little to think about it: I had to keep on acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all.
Bromden has faked his own deafness for years as an act of self-preservation. It allows him to fade into the background and collect ammunition against the hospital staff without anyone noticing. Now, this decision is backfiring on him. He realizes that in order to get what he wants (a spot on the fishing expedition) he would have to reveal his secret and make Nurse Ratched so angry that she would surgically debilitate him, making sure he could never hear or speak again. Ironically, a decision made out of self-preservation has put Bromden at great risk.
The fact that Bromden wants to go on the fishing expedition is testament to the change McMurphy has brought to the ward. Bromden has always disappeared into his hallucinations of fog, and the idea of leaving the hospital has only just started to occur to him. More than that though, Bromden's smile suggests that he is starting to adopt McMurphy's tools of resistance. When McMurphy is in a seemingly powerless position, he laughs at Nurse Ratched, at the other men, and at the situation he is in. Here, Bromden finds himself in a seemingly powerless position. He cannot have what he wants because declaring that he wants it would put him in danger. Whereas this feeling of powerlessness has previously led Bromden to hallucinate fog and to despair about the conditions on the ward, he now cracks a smile at the irony of his situation. This smile is not full-on laughter, but it does hint that Bromden is starting to use laughter and joy as tools to take control of his own experience on the ward.
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