One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest features many allusions and references to Christian religion. Most obvious is McMurphy's martyrdom at the novel's climax. But this incident is foreshadowed throughout the novel with a series of direct references to events recounted in the New Testament.
While McMurphy's actions and attitudes are at first glance more Dionysian than Christian in that he emphasizes gambling, womanizing, and drinking over spirituality, his messianic qualities are apparent from his initial entrance into the ward. His laughter — representative of the human spirit — is contrasted with the snickers the patients hide with their hands and the disingenuous laugh of the Public Relations man. The machinations of the Combine trap their spirit. McMurphy's laughter, however, is described by Chief Bromden as "free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it's lapping against the walls all over the ward…. This sounds real. I realize it's the first laugh I've heard in years."
Later, Chief describes McMurphy's laughter during the fishing excursion: "Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain."
