Happy Birthday Glen

“It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen (8).” Living in his world of make-believe and schizophrenia, the six feet, eight inches tall Indian, named Chief Bromden, allows himself to believe that the images and things he sees are real, even though they exist only in his mind. When the story is told through his eyes, a completely surreal and cartoon-like world is created along with many “manipulations of reality (Nastu).” He wants to be free from the ward, and does not like it there, but he would rather mentally and emotionally hide than do anything about it. “Though men yearn to be free, they also fear it and wish to be dependent. Chief Bromden sits in the cuckoo’s nest because he has not the courage to face the world (Sullivan 100).” Chief Bromden uses many metaphors of things that are imagined and unseen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They explain the unexplainable and act as an escape from understanding and dealing with reality. Chief Bromden retreated into a deaf and dumb act. He had everyone fooled into thinking that he was deaf and dumb. He reminisced on the reasons why he feigned deaf and dumbness and surmised that it was because that was how people treated him (McMahan). “It wasn’t me that started acting deaf: it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all (198).” Many times throughout Bromden’s life he was treated as if he was completely invisible. It first started when some people came to his home to take away his tribe’s land while they said rude, selfish, and hurtful things about his lifestyle while he was standing right beside them. They acted as if “[he] wasn’t there at all,” or like he couldn’t even hear them (201). He even felt as if he were invisible within the ward. “They [saw] right through [him]” as he did his chores and pushed his broom everywhere. He felt so completely invisible that he believed the only thing the people at the ward would miss if he was gone “would be the sponge and the water bucket floating around (143).” Ellen Herrenkohl believes that Bromden being treated as if he were nonexistent is his ultimate lesson in losing his identity, and there is no better way to be dehumanized. This loss of himself made him believe that retreat into a deaf and dumb act would make things easier 0in “the hostile world of the ward (Madden 161).” Pretending to be deaf and dumb was a security and a “protection against a society which [denied] him dignity as a human being (One).” It made him feel as if he was in control of his nonexistence. This act gave him a solid, concrete excuse to not have to take action, expand his mind, or think of what life could have in store for him in his future if he attempted to find ways to escape the ward or, at least, his personal prison. Bromden “would be free to act according to his own will if he knew what he wanted, thought, and felt (Herrenkohl 115).” But instead, he acts as if he were deaf and dumb to avoid that freedom. Machinery is another thing Chief Bromden uses to describe the world in a way he understands. It allows him to make sense of his surroundings. Everything in Bromden’s world is made up of mechanist parts. He sees society as one big “Combine,” which Irving Malin says has three values: imprisonment, mechanization, and unreality. Matthew Rick describes the Combine as a “crushing, overpowering authority which squelches humanity and individuality in favor of conformity and estrangement from one’s emotions.” The Big Nurse, or Miss Ratched, is “a sure power” whom Bromden believes works for the Combine (Rick). She controls all her patients with “hairlike wires” that extend to each of them and are “too small for anybody’s eye but [Bromden’s] (26).” The patients are each made up of wires, gadgets, and parts. There are even machines working in the walls that “whirr and hum (31).” The only person that Bromden never describes in mechanist terms is McMurphy, but the rest of the ward is one big machine controlled by the combine (Semino). Although Chief Bromden’s developed an incredible knowledge of machinery in college when he studied electronics for a year and when he was an electrician’s assistant during World War II, he was lacking in understanding the “inner workings of people, and to some extent society.” Machinery was familiar to him and it describes a wide range of things in the world that Bromden lived in which he otherwise would not be able to relate to. It is described in terms of things that he would usually find “frightening or confusing, such as the hospital or others’ emotional outbursts (Semino).” He described himself and others each as “machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in (21).” This thought simply allows him to believe that there is nothing he can do about anything. He has no willpower and everything is hopeless. Bromden is in denial of the fact that he and others in the ward possibly are weak, and too scared to act and formulate opinions of their own. Instead, He would rather believe that each individual within the ward, including himself, is equipped with machinery that controls everything they do. Elana Semino and Kate Swindlehurst describe this sense that Bromden lacks control over his actions and thoughts as a feeling that he is being controlled by “intangible forces” and these forces provide for him a “justification for his disorientation.” Bromden does not actually see what is inside of each individual so he discards the fact that each one is full of working human organs and a human brain, and replaces it with a more comfortable fact: everyone and everything is a machine. Chief Bromden also imagines that there is a fog machine within the ward that omits a fog he can hide in. Whenever he is feeling confused, hopeless, or nonexistent, he simply “loses [himself] in the fog (39).” In the beginning, he hates the fog, but he slowly convinces himself that “being lost isn’t so bad (126.)” Whenever he is feeling slightly optimistic he has unnatural “clarity of vision” and explains these occurrences of foglessness as times when the fog machine must have just broken down. On the contrary, when the fog is “rolling in (127)” it is associated with fear and pessimism and the belief that the machine has been fixed (Semino). He compares the fog machine supposedly inside the ward to those that were actually used in battle when he was overseas for World War II (124).
Once you were out of the hatch you couldn’t’ see no more than maybe three feet in any direction. You felt like you were out on that airfield all by yourself. You were safe from the enemy, but you were awfully alone...[the fog was a] soft furry whiteness so thick that your body just faded into white below the belt. (125) The fog was so thick that he couldn’t see himself from the waist down. Basically, when Bromden was in the fog, he didn’t have any balls to get himself out. “Nobody complains about the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe (123).” Herrenkohl calls the fog an “actuality barrier which [Bromden] pulls down around himself to protect himself and create a cave of safety (Herrenkohl).” This cave allows Bromden to escape from something that could be “potentially threatening” like war or the ward or simply denial of himself. Because of these uncomfortable things, it gives him reason to justify his disoriented view that there is a fog machine inside the ward. The threat of these things makes him want to avoid “contact with the environment (Semino).” He feels that if he remains in an invisible state, he himself is invisible, and nothing he does will matter. Herrenkohl explains this by saying that “to see clearly, to be seen clearly, is to be vulnerable. To admit to oneself one’s feelings and one’s perceptions is to be open to disappointment, to fear, to rejection, to rage, to guilt, to tragedy.” Bromden is vulnerable; he feels vulnerable. In order to escape he retreats into the nonexistence in the fog. Randall Patrick McMurphy eventually leads Chief Bromden out of the fog, machinery, and denial. He is the only one that Bromden perceives that isn’t made up of controls and parts (Semino). “McMurphy is the one who induces the ‘psychosis’ in Bromden, the one who ‘turns him on’ and forces him to confront the Combine and the ‘fog machine (Sherman 149).’” At first, Bromden is hesitant of the intentions of McMurphy, the sex-loving, hard-working, fighting, gambling man, who decided to come to the ward instead of staying at the work farm that he was at before. McMurphy gets mad at everyone for being too “chicken-shit (113).” He is completely disappointed in them and goes along to prove something by betting that he could lift a massive control panel that “probably weighs four hundred pounds,” and throw it out the window (121). His veins squeeze up to the surface and he even bloodies his hands while his “whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift.” Finally, he turns to walk out and says, “But I tried, though. Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now didn’t I (121)?” After that, Bromden realizes that McMurphy is the most unselfish person he has ever known, and every man on the ward depends on him for self-actualization.
Bromden was plagued by a yellow-toothed “hungry-looking guy” on a different ward who kept yelling at him to “look me!” Bromden finally understood what McMurphy must have been going through and wondered how he kept going so positively “plagued by a hundred faces like that, or two hundred, or a thousand (266).” Everyone needed him and McMurphy knew this. He is there for all the “self defeated patients who have let society’s label destroy them (Klinkowitz 122).” McMurphy wanted Bromden and the other men to step out and do something. If they wanted something, go get it, and if they wanted to say something, say it. He alone made Bromden feel like he was not invisible, deaf, dumb, or weak. He wanted everyone to begin to wake up and realize that there was another way. According to Jerome Klinkowitz, “McMurphy is advocating a proletarian revolution of the mind; it is his new valuation of the terms of life which makes him a threat” to the ward. He is “inventing a new way of perceiving reality, which is nothing less than a new reality itself.” With McMurphy’s conscious as well as unconscious help, Bromden was able to slowly find himself again.
Chief Bromden was the master hider. Not only did he hide from the real world by faking his deafness and dumbness, but he hid from himself. He denied the fact that he wasn’t a machine and he retreated into the fog where he would not have to think, or be seen. Finally, Bromden realized that “You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself (125).” In the end, Chief Bromden chose the former. He had been lost for so many years already he did not need to “[be] away” any longer (311). It is fogging a little, but he “won’t slip off and hide in it. No…never again (275).” Never again would Bromden lose himself in his invisible world and his false reality.

Works Cited Herrenkohl, Ellen. “Personal Identity and Spiritual Rebirth.” Readings on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. Lawrence Kappel. California: Greenhaven, 2000. (109-115) Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: The Viking Press, 1964 Klinkowitz, Jerome. “McMurphy as Revolutionary Hero.” Readings on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. Lawrence Kappel. California: Greenhaven, 2000. (123-125) Madden, Fred. “Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner.” Readings on One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. Lawrence Kappel. California: Greenhaven, 2000. (52, 60-61) Malin, Irving. Ken Kesey; text and criticism. Ed. John Clark Pratt. New York: Penguin Group, 1996 (442-443) McMahan, Elizabeth. “A Sexist Novel.” Readings on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. Lawrence Kappel. California: Greenhaven, 2000. (81) Nastu, Paul. “Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Heldref: 1997. EBSCOhost

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey 1962 Novel.” Magill Book Reviews:

2006. Rick, Matthew. “Tarnished Galahad: The Prose and Pranks of Ken Kesey.”

Semino, Elana, and Kate Swindlehurst. “Metaphor and Mind Style in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Northern Illinois University, 1996. Sherman, W.D. “Bromden’s Spiritual Journey.” Readings on One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. Lawrence Kappel. California: Greenhaven, 2000. (147-151) Sullivan, Ruth. “Kesey and Freud.” Readings on One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. Lawrence Kappel. California: Greenhaven, 2000. (100-101)

Thesis: Chief Bromden uses many metaphors of things that are imagined and unseen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They explain the unexplainable and act as an escape from understanding and dealing with reality. I. Deaf and Dumb A. Why did Bromden fake Deaf and Dumbness

1. Others
2. Hiding B. What was the result
3. Loss of self
4. Loss of freedom II. Machines A. What does Bromden see as a machine
   1. People
   2. The Ward B. Why Bromden uses machine imagery
   3. Understands machines
   4. Explains unexplainable III. Fog A. When does Bromden use fog imagery
5. Pessimism
6. Vulnerability B. Why does Bromden use machine imagery
7. Escape
8. Hide IV. Randall Patrick McMurphy A. Who is McMurphy B. What McMurphy does
9. Stops Bromden from hiding
10. Helps Bromden find himself