One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Scarlet Letter Living with Fear Living with fear and not being overwhelmed by it is the final test of maturity. This test has been "performed" by various literary characters. It appears that Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter have taken and passed this test. At first it seemed that the chief was going to fail this graduation test in the psychiatric ward where he had been admitted. . He had locked himself away acting deaf and dumb. He had an immense fear of the "Combine", or society, which 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 exact opposite of the Cape. This courage eventually passed to the leader. In one meeting, when McMurphy was voting to show that the patients wanted to see the World Series, the Chief voted in favor. He initially said McMurphy was controlling his hand. He later admitted that he was the one who raised the issue. One night he even talked to McMurphy and started laughing about the situation. One day, when McMurphy and the chief tried to help another patient who was being taken advantage of by the orderlies, they were caught and sentenced to electroshock therapy (EST). Chi usually lost consciousness in the fog when faced with problems; however, this time (he had endured over 200 EST sessions previously) he did not. However, McMurphy was getting worse and the two appeared to switch positions. McMurphy was ultimately sentenced to a lobotomy, which left him as helpless and pathetic a person as the boss had once been. The boss now had the courage to put McMurphy out of his misery, despite what the head nurse, Nurse Ratched, the company's symbol for the boss, would do to him. He choked McMurphy and subsequently escaped by lifting the control panel, which McMurphy told him he could lift but the head considered himself "small", symbolic of his strength against the combine, and breaking a