One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Blog Response 3

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Throughout a novel, as events unravel characters are subject to change. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest this is particularly true and visible in almost every-if not all- characters. The power struggle and the chaos that McMurphy creates drive all the patients in the ward to change and become more powerful and strong, the staff of the ward also falls victim to this wave of change. The nurses and orderlies start to loose power and become impotent when it comes to controlling the patients. Most of the changes are explicit and visible, often narrated, however there is one character whose transformation is clear but is not explicit: Chief Bromden. Being the narrator makes him somewhat impartial to his own situation, without fully realizing it he changes throughout the novel to the point where he becomes a strong man who is no longer under the whips and chains of The Combine.

            When the novel starts-with Chief Bromden speaking- he is a very obscure man, who has been pretending to be deaf and dumb for over 10 years. He is actually very smart and insightful but the way he has been controlled-through drugs and mental abuse- has made him retreat back into the deepest corners of his mind. This is shown when he says: “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 ”. The oppression and negligence of the hospital made him that way. His situation is so critical that he hallucinates that a fog surrounds him and clouds his vision of reality, machines spy him and try to control his every move. He feels that he has lost his human essence and his individuality; the control that the so-called Combine exerts over him has dehumanized him to the point of insanity. Being a victim of the combine during his entire life-the government taking his father’s tribe off their lands, having to fight the war which is known to be among the most excruciatingly painful experiences a human has to live, being interned in an oppressive mental hospital which drove him to insanity with their dehumanizing, mind numbing methods- caused him to be completely dead of spirit and mind. Bromden is so weak that even though he is huge he says to McMurphy that he “used to be big, but not no more”. After years of shady memories and days were the clocks didn’t advance at all-or made a whole turn in would seemed like a second- Chief Bromden’s mind is set free.

            With McMurphy’s arrival comes the whole plot of the novel. He starts to defy authority and set the patients free. Bromden is no exception to this wave of lucidness-in mental patients- that McMurphy causes. The Chief starts to slowly escape the fog and set his mind free, he describes the moment when “the fog was finally swept” from him as “breaking the surface after being under water a hundred years”. Simultaneously he starts to act with his mind free and without the fog’s intervention. He raises his hand in the vote for the baseball game. He starts talking for the first time in years, he decides to go to the fishing trip, he fights the black boys along McMurphy, he gets drunk. Finally he decides to euthanize McMurphy and pick up the panel and throw it to the window to escape. The best example of the Chief Bromden’s change in the novel is his physical perception of himself, “he used to be big but not anymore”, later in the novel he mentions how his “foot was bigger than I’d ever seen it”. He doesn’t actually grow physically but his mind perceives it so. The real change is in his spirit and his mind, where he becomes a giant.

            McMurphy drags Chief Bromden out of the fog, he liberates his mind and humanizes him. After years of routine and control, of monotonous and abusive treatments designed to cripple the mind and the spirit of a man, McMurphy creates a revolution of change-redundant as that may be- that spreads like the wake of a boat in calm waters through the patients. Bromden is perhaps the one that changes the most with this revolution. He goes from one end of the spectrum to the complete other side. First he is a man who has pretended to be deaf and dumb for ten years, unnoticed, taken for granted, a chronic. In only a matter of months he has recovered all his consciousness, his confidence and even his size. His mind which was lost in haze of drugs and shock treatments is suddenly set free and empowered, to the point that-in his own mind-he becomes big and strong once again, so brave that he manages to escape and kill-out of pity and respect-the man who set him free.