Nurse Duckett
Nurse Sue Ann Duckett is a tall, spare, mature, straight-backed woman with a prominent, well-rounded ass, small breasts and angular ascetic New England features that came equally close to being very lovely and very plain. Her skin was white and pink, her eyes small, her nose and chin slender and sharp. She was able, prompt, strict and intelligent. She welcomed responsibility and kept her head in every crisis. She was adult and self-reliant, and there was nothing she needed from anyone. Yossarian took pity and decided to help her.
Identity and Introduction
Nurse Duckett is introduced as one of the ward nurses who didn't like Yossarian, accompanying the brisk and serious doctors on their morning rounds. She is the one who makes a note to give Yossarian another pill when the doctors order it. She is also the nurse who, along with Nurse Cramer, keeps the Soldier in White spick-and-span, brushing his bandages with a whiskbroom and scrubbing the plaster casts on his arms, legs, shoulders, chest and pelvis with soapy water. She polishes the glass jars unceasingly. She is proud of her housework. When Yossarian and Dunbar create chaos in the ward by grabbing her, she takes charge: she takes Yossarian by his ear and puts him back in bed. She is the one who, when Yossarian is wounded in the leg, takes him by his ear and puts him back in bed. She is the one who, when Yossarian is wounded in the leg, takes him by his ear and puts him back in bed.
Relationship with Yossarian: From Antagonism to Intimacy
Yossarian's first physical advance on Nurse Duckett is a calculated assault: he slips his hand stealthily into the narrow space between her knees and brings it up swiftly under her dress as far as it would go. She shrieks and jumps into the air a mile, but it isn't high enough, and she squirms and vaults and seesaws back and forth on her divine fulcrum for almost a full fifteen seconds before she wiggles free. Dunbar then springs forward and flings both arms around her bosom from behind. She lets out another scream and twists away, fleeing far enough from Dunbar for Yossarian to lunge forward and grab her by the snatch again. She bounces out across the aisle once more like a ping-pong ball with legs. The ward is in a chaotic uproar. Nurse Duckett is in tears, and Yossarian is consoling her apologetically as he sits beside her on the edge of a bed. Despite this violent beginning, she becomes his lover. They meet almost every afternoon that both are free and come to the beach on the other side of a narrow swell of shoulder-high dunes. She wears a two-piece bathing suit to contain and cover her tiny, long-nippled breasts. She revels in the attention Yossarian and the others give her, prattling nonsensically when they are striving hardest to think, and a pink flush of elation creeps into her cheeks when they give her sharp raps on the arms and legs with their fists and tell her to shut up. She revels in such attention and ducks her short chestnut bangs with joy. She does not understand Yossarian's lust, but she is willing to take his word for it. She loves to watch him taking short naps with his face down and his arm thrown across her, or staring bleakly at the endless tame, quiet waves. She is calm in his silences. She loves to look at his wide, long, sinewy back with its bronzed, unblemished skin. She loves to bring him to flame instantly by taking his whole ear in her mouth suddenly and running her hand down his front all the way. She loves to make him burn and suffer till dark, then satisfy him. Then kiss him adoringly because she has brought him such bliss.
Professional Composure and Its Limits
Despite her intimate relationship with Yossarian, Nurse Duckett maintains her professional authority in the hospital. When the Soldier in White returns, she is there to restore order, pleading with Dunbar and Yossarian to go back to their beds. She is the one who gives Yossarian the urgent news about Dunbar: "They're going to disappear him." She heard them talking behind a door. She doesn't know who, she doesn't know what it means, but she knows it is happening. When Yossarian presses her for details, she protests with hurt feelings, "I'm only trying to help. It isn't my fault they're going to disappear him, is it? I shouldn't even be telling you." Yossarian takes her in his arms and hugs her with gentle, contrite affection, kissing her cheek respectfully, and hurries away to warn Dunbar, who is nowhere to be found.
Change and Ending: Abandonment and Shame
Nurse Duckett's final appearance marks a decisive break. When Yossarian refuses to fly more missions, she becomes ashamed of him because he would cause a scandal. She decides to marry a doctor—any doctor, because they all do so well in business—and will not take chances in the vicinity of the man who might someday be her husband. She abandons Yossarian at the very moment he needs her most, choosing professional and social security over personal loyalty. When the chaplain comes to retrieve Yossarian's uniform so he can escape, Yossarian says, "Ask Nurse Duckett for it. She'll help you. She'll do anything she can to be rid of me." Her final act is one of complicity in his erasure, a quiet betrayal that completes the novel's portrait of a system in which even love is a transaction.
Thematic Significance
Nurse Duckett's arc traces the impossibility of sustaining personal integrity within an institutional framework that rewards conformity and punishes dissent. She begins as a competent, self-reliant professional who keeps her head in every crisis, but she ends as a woman who abandons her lover to protect her own prospects. Her trajectory mirrors that of the chaplain, who also wavers between courage and cowardice, but unlike the chaplain, who ultimately chooses to persevere, Nurse Duckett chooses self-preservation. She is the novel's most damning example of how the system corrupts even those who seem most capable of resisting it, reducing a woman of strength and intelligence to a creature of calculation and shame.
