Rabbits and wolves

The Rabbits and wolves metaphor is Dale Harding’s account of power as a naturalized struggle between the strong and the weak, and of the patients’ effort to live within the diminished roles assigned to them. Its significance lies in how it makes submission sound like both an inescapable fact and a deliberate survival strategy. Randle Patrick McMurphy disputes that logic, while Harding’s shifting application of the image leaves their difference unsettled: beneath a loud performance, either man might be more vulnerable—or more formidable—than the label suggests.

The Metaphor as a Law of Power

Harding presents the world as a contest in which the strong grow stronger by consuming the weak. His rabbit does not meet the wolf in combat. It becomes sly, frightened, and elusive, digs holes, hides, and endures. This account makes fear and retreat seem not merely understandable but prudent: the rabbit knows its place and survives by recognizing the wolf’s advantage. The metaphor therefore describes unequal power while also turning that inequality into an apparent law of nature, something to accept rather than challenge.

The image is pointedly social. Harding identifies himself, Dr. Spivey, Cheswick, and Billy Bibbit as rabbits, placing the men together in a shared condition rather than treating their difficulties as isolated weaknesses. He describes them as unable to adjust to their rabbithood, not as people made into rabbits by the ward. In his formulation, they would be rabbits wherever they were; the nurse, by contrast, is the strong wolf who teaches them their place. That distinction shifts the explanation from the pressures of their surroundings to an identity they are expected to accept.

McMurphy’s Challenge and the Rabbits Made Visible

McMurphy refuses Harding’s naturalized hierarchy. He challenges the idea that a woman in authority should be able to make the men accept themselves as rabbits, and insists that neither he nor Harding belongs in the category. The disagreement is not simply over which animal best describes them: McMurphy objects to the fatalism built into the comparison, especially its demand that the weak should endure rather than fight.

Harding’s language then becomes an uncomfortable demonstration. He calls on Billy and Cheswick to perform as rabbits, and Chief Bromden sees the two men change into hunched-over white rabbits. Yet they are too ashamed to do what Harding has asked. The scene gives the metaphor a visible, bodily form without making their response a willing performance: the men cannot take up even the comic display that would confirm Harding’s account of them.

Harding interprets their shame as guilt for failing to stand up for a friend and for having allowed Nurse Ratched to make them her interrogators again. He then folds that failure back into the metaphor, treating their reluctance to defend one another as evidence that a rabbit does not defend its fellow. The explanation is bitterly self-sealing: their submission demonstrates the role, and their distress at it becomes another reason to call them rabbits. McMurphy’s protest exposes what that reasoning costs, even as Harding calls the men cowardly but wise.

Turning the Image on McMurphy

Harding does not leave McMurphy outside the comparison. He suggests that beneath the newcomer’s cowboy bluster and sideshow swagger, McMurphy may be as soft and rabbit-souled as the others. McMurphy answers with mock agreement, then asks what would make him a rabbit: his fighting, his sexual behavior, or his supposed psychopathic tendencies. The exchange makes the metaphor unstable. Its categories are no longer reserved for a visibly timid group; they can also be applied to someone whose manner advertises defiance.

Harding takes up McMurphy’s sexual joke and argues that, by rabbit standards, McMurphy may be a healthy, functioning, adequate rabbit, while the other men are too weak or sexually incapable to qualify. His elaboration turns the animal comparison into a measure not only of courage but of bodily and sexual adequacy. The joke sharpens the contrast between McMurphy’s conspicuous confidence and the men’s self-described failures, without settling whether apparent vigor is the same thing as power.

The Wolf Question

Harding’s tone shifts across the exchange. He takes McMurphy’s hand in both of his while describing the strong devouring the weak; later he releases it, leans back, crosses his legs, and draws on his cigarette. His laughter starts again, and he points the cigarette toward McMurphy like a thin, smoking finger. These gestures accompany a performance that moves between earnest argument, teasing, and ridicule, making the metaphor itself feel less fixed than Harding’s claim that the rabbits know their place.

After someone abruptly tells Harding to shut his mouth, he falls silent with his mouth still open. Then, speaking so softly that Chief has to bring his broom close to hear, Harding tells McMurphy he may be a wolf. McMurphy rejects both identities, insisting that he is no wolf and Harding no rabbit; Harding answers that McMurphy has a wolf-like roar. The exchange ends not with a settled classification but with a distinction between appearance and sound: McMurphy’s defiant roar may signal strength, yet the metaphor has already taught the reader to ask what vulnerability might lie beneath it. Its force comes from that unresolved tension between a role imposed by hierarchy, a role embraced as an explanation, and the possibility of refusing the comparison altogether.