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Chief Bromden In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's

1444 Words6 Pages

When our main protagonist, Chief Bromden is first introduced, he starts out in the fog; however, when McMurphy arrives, everything changes: “They haven’t really fogged the place full force all day today, not since McMurphy came in” (Kesey 75). The fog keeps everybody content or at least unwilling to stand up against the system, but McMurphy inspires them all to stand up for themselves. The fog is symbolic of the waste that our mechanized society has created, and how it pollutes our ability to live naturally: the combine. The fog that Bromden experiences is a representation of the lack of transparency by the Combine of the ward. The clearing of the fog occurs with McMurphy's rebellion and represents the newfound clarity that Bromden and the other patients acquire when McMurphy is around. Someone needs to rise up against the fog machine; however, everyone in the ward up until McMurphy's arrival has conformed to the rules and commands. After McMurphy arrives, Chief Bromden notices that his laughter is the first genuine laughter he has heard in years. The longer McMurphy is on the ward, the more the men begin to laugh. Laughter becomes a symbol and an active representation of the men’s freedom, even though they are basically imprisoned by the ward and by society. They can …show more content…

McMurphy leads Bromden out of the fog, but she lures him back in. The fog represents the state of mind that Ratched imposes on the patients with her strict, mind-numbing routines and humiliating treatment. Under the influence of the fog, the patients have no control over their bodies, they can not move or think clearly, and their vision is blurred: “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” (Kesey 103). These examples prove that Ratched is in complete

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Mack won and broke Nurse Ratched’s power one last time. Chief Bromden uses ‘fog’ as his escape from fear in the Cuckoo Nest. It was his escape from reality while he was in the military and it stuck with him for almost his entire time at the ward. “Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now, as bad as it is, you can slip back in and feel

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As a leader, he is able to unite the men against Nurse Ratched. His rebellion is similar to the rebellion of various countercultures in the 1960s. During group meetings, the Nurse routinely turns the men on each other in what McMurphy describes as a “pecking party” (Kesey 57). The men fall to her trickery because they are afraid of the repercussions of defying her. McMurphy successfully gets the men to rebel against her by sitting in front of the T.V. when it is not the scheduled time, leading to Nurse Ratched “ranting and screaming behind us”

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