Rabbits

Rabbits are the prey in Dale Harding’s stark model of life on the ward: frightened, evasive creatures who survive by hiding rather than confronting the stronger wolf. His metaphor turns the patients’ submission into an apparent law of nature, but its very insistence reveals how thoroughly they have learned to accept that submission as their identity. When Randle Patrick McMurphy challenges Harding’s account, the image becomes a point of conflict over whether fear is an unavoidable nature or a role the patients have been taught to inhabit.

The Rabbit in Harding’s Account

Harding presents the world as a contest in which the strong grow stronger by devouring the weak. In this order, rabbits recognize the wolf’s strength and respond by becoming sly, frightened, and elusive: they dig holes, hide, endure, and know their place. The rabbit’s method is survival through avoidance, not victory. Harding even treats resistance as an imprudent breach of the natural order, asking whether it would be wise for a rabbit to challenge a wolf to combat.

The analogy maps this hierarchy directly onto the ward. Harding names himself a rabbit and includes Dr. Spivey, Cheswick, and Billy Bibbit among the same vulnerable class; Nurse Ratched is the strong wolf who, in his account, can teach them their place. The comparison does not merely describe who has power. It makes the power relation seem inevitable: if the patients are rabbits by nature, then their retreat can appear sensible rather than imposed, and the nurse’s dominance can pass for a lesson in how the world works.

Nature, Role, and McMurphy’s Objection

Harding makes an important distinction between being made into a rabbit by the ward and being unable to adjust to being one. He insists that the patients would be rabbits wherever they lived; they are in the hospital because they cannot reconcile themselves to their supposed nature. When McMurphy protests that Harding is letting a nurse persuade him to be a rabbit, Harding rejects persuasion as the cause. He says he was born that way and needs the nurse to make him content with his role. The language shifts responsibility inward: the problem becomes the patients’ failure to accept their weakness, not the conditions that reinforce it.

McMurphy’s blunt refusal to accept the label exposes the choice hidden inside Harding’s natural-law explanation. Harding describes retreat as the proper response of prey; McMurphy treats that description as an excuse for surrender. Their disagreement is therefore not simply over whether the patients are frightened. It is over whether fear defines them, and whether accepting that definition protects them or keeps them subordinate. The rabbit image gives McMurphy something concrete to challenge, but Harding’s repeated insistence shows how difficult it is to separate an imposed role from a self-conception that has come to feel innate.

The Group Made Visible

Chief Bromden’s narration gives Harding’s analogy a startling visual form: Billy Bibbit and Cheswick change into hunched-over white rabbits before his eyes. Yet the transformation does not make them act out the rabbit behaviors Harding has described. They are too ashamed to perform them. The scene thus holds the metaphor between an inward identity and an outward spectacle: the patients look like the creatures in Harding’s story, while their reluctance to enact it suggests that the identity is neither effortless nor wholly accepted.

Harding interprets their silence as further confirmation of the role. He suggests that they feel guilty for failing to defend him and for having let Nurse Ratched turn them into his interrogators, then argues that a rabbit has no duty to stand up for another rabbit. His reasoning absorbs both betrayal and remorse into the same system: their failure to help him is not an exception that might challenge the metaphor, but proof that they are behaving as rabbits should. The image consequently describes group relations as well as individual fear. It accounts for how the patients can injure one another under pressure and then treat that conduct as unavoidable.

Cheswick objects that he has sometimes criticized Nurse Ratched too, but Harding distinguishes between making a challenge and safely withdrawing it. Cheswick, he says, spoke quietly and later took his words back. Harding therefore holds no grudge against him for having attacked Harding during the meeting; he says he would have done the same if their positions had been reversed. The rabbit role supplies a ready explanation for shifting sides and failing to protect a fellow patient. McMurphy, by contrast, says the group ought to be ashamed of joining Nurse Ratched against Harding. Their dispute makes the metaphor’s moral cost explicit: what Harding calls natural behavior, McMurphy recognizes as a choice with consequences for the person left exposed.

Masculinity and the Rabbit World

Harding also uses the image to absorb an accusation McMurphy has raised about the nurse’s insinuations concerning men’s sexual adequacy. Rather than dismissing McMurphy’s observation, Harding says he had correctly drawn attention to where Nurse Ratched concentrates her attacks. He claims that every man on the ward fears losing, or having already lost, his sexual capacity. The rabbit metaphor, initially a picture of political and social weakness, narrows into an account of damaged masculinity.

Harding extends the comparison by arguing that many patients cannot even meet the standard of sexual adequacy he associates with rabbits. They become, in his bleak formulation, rabbits within a rabbit world: weak and inadequate even by the measure of the class to which they belong. The progression is more than a joke about animal behavior. It shows Harding turning an external hierarchy into a scale on which the patients can rank and diminish themselves. Even the presumed ordinary capacities of a rabbit become a standard against which they can be judged deficient.

Significance of the Image

The rabbit is at once Harding’s explanation of the patients’ conduct and a defense against McMurphy’s demand that they resist. Its strength lies in how much it can account for: hiding, silence, retreat, complicity, and the shame of feeling inadequate. But that comprehensiveness is also its trap. If every failure to resist confirms that the patients are rabbits, then the metaphor leaves almost no room for evidence that they might act otherwise. McMurphy’s challenge matters because he refuses to let the image settle the question of what the patients can do.

In Chief Bromden’s account, the rabbits remain a humanly applied figure rather than independent animal characters. Their importance comes from the tension between Harding’s certainty that the patients were born to their role and the visible embarrassment, disagreement, and protest that accompany his explanation. The image makes submission vivid, but it does not make submission innocent: the group can see what its behavior looks like, and McMurphy insists that seeing it carries a moral demand.