Farfetched is Always Better

This is subtle.  This is refreshing.  And this is original.  One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is a story about what happens in a mental institute; but it represents so much more, says so much more, and symbolizes so much more.  Take, for example, the fog that appears only once, and can seem confusing and misleading, but can be interpreted to fit different molds of the context in which the novel was written. 

Chief Bromden is a Chronic. He is “in there for good.”  As such he pretends that he is deaf, he hallucinates constantly and suffers from constant anguish and paranoia.  Granted, that paranoia can take root in the shock treatments that he has received and the way that he has been treated in times past, but he narrates mundane events to an extent that makes them seem extraordinary.  When he is being shaved he starts saying that a dense white of fog that doesn’t let him see six inches in front of him is covering his face.  At first, I thought that that may have been the shaving cream, you know, maybe it had dripped into his eyes.  But after further reading, I think that nothing actually happened during his shave, Bromden was hallucinating.  If I were to base my interpretation solely on the time period that the book was written in I would say that Ken Kesey was trying to instill a subtle point about control of the masses on behalf of the government— the masses being the inmates and the government being the nurses and doctors— like some sort of political or civil rights point.  In this case, the fog is a sort of shaded lens that the control puts over the oppressed even in the most common events, thus it was displayed when he was being shaved.  Another possibility is that the fog is simply a hallucination with no backbone to the nature of it and that it was just a part of his flawed and frenetic mental state.  Here you take this short portion of the book at face value and understand that there is no way that an insane man could add any value to such a weird occurrence and the author is simply writing a novel with that included excerpt like any other.  I’d rather convince myself that the former is true and eliminate the latter as a possibility.  It seems more interesting.  More original.  And it makes what I am yet to read more engrossing.