One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Blog response 2

Often in literature symbols or objects are thoroughly described using imagery. The author appeals to the five senses of the reader to evoke a very vivid image in the object being described. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey describes machines through imagery to show the control that the ward has over the patients how they dehumanize them. The machines are a clear symbol of that dehumanization that the inmates suffer, and how their individuality and freewill is constantly removed through medicine and mental control.

            On page 141 The Chief describes a moment when he wakes up at night: “… I woke up, my eyes were all crusted over and the dorm was full of smoke, wires in the walls loaded to the limit, twisting and sparking death and hate in the air-all to much for me to take so I’d ram my head under the pillow and try to get back to sleep. Every time I peeked back out there would be the smell of burning hair and a sound like side meat on a hot griddle”. This quote is loaded with imagery, appealing to sound, to smell, to sight, to taste and touch, all describing the machinery on the wall. The author also personifies the machines giving them power to make actions and movements. “Twisting and sparking death and hate” the machines scare Chief Bromden and impose that veil of hate and control over the inmates. It is implied that this visions of machines are caused by a error in the dose of medicine given, this shows how the people who run the ward are trying to control the patients planting fear and paranoia in their minds, crippling their ability to think clearly. Machines are basically the opposite of a human, or the inverse. They can perform many functions that humans can-often quicker and with better results-but they are repetitive and dependent. The Big Nurse is trying to create machines out of the patients, making them dependent on her and her authority, submerging them in a numbing routine of helplessness and abuse.

            The imagery in the description of the machines depicts a hostile environment. Burning hair, hate, sparkles, smoke, twists, death, meat on a griddle. When one reads this description-at least I-imagines a factory, a dark factory where there is no sanitation or rights for the workers. Something closely related to a still mill. Everything is burning and the machines are constantly processing the molten metal to create no metal-possibly for war or destruction-and with each step, the free hot liquid that is the molten metal is slowly caged in by the machines to become this lifeless artifact to serve a larger machine. This picture came to mind as I read that passage in the book. Possibly Chief Bromden is scared that the machines will dehumanize him to the point that he-and any other patients-become lifeless shapes.