Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'- Midway Review

Excuse my lack of updates. It’s no fun when your kindle is stolen. Anyway, I happened to find that I’m quite enjoying this book more as a physical book than a kindle, and I have no idea why. Anyway, though it still offers a lack of description and only occasional quotes, most of which are embedded in the descriptions, I find that I tend to enjoy all of the character’s quirks. Billy’s constant stream of stuttering, McMurphy’s sass, and I tend to even enjoy being delved in the narrator, ‘Chief’ Bromden’s insanity flashes which he calls the fog.

or a while I took everything he said very literally, then I kind of realized that it was all hallucinations and it made A LOT more sense. Bromden always talks about this ‘fog’ that he hides in sometimes that stops him from getting hurt. He says “Nobody complains about the fog, I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out into the open where we’d be easy to get at,” (123). It seems like when they go on these insanity flips, they aren’t as bothered by the staff of the asylum to follow procedures in particular and they are excused if they do something somewhat out of line or don’t respond because they simply are unable to. What I notice here is that he doesn’t say ‘McMurphy doesn’t understand”, which would imply he was capable of doing so, but just hasn’t. He said “McMurphy can’t,”. McMurphy can’t understand because he’s not insane. He will never be in the situation that they’re in, so when they space off or become distant he can’t see why. McMurphy tries to get them to open up and be happy when they play games like poker or monopoly with jokes and other things, and can’t see why they don’t actually do so. Bromden overall blames the asylum for his ‘fog’, developing this ‘fog machine’ in his mind. Maybe he’s trying to say that the hospital is really what’s driving him mad. While on the other hand, McMurphy brings a little light into the situation and helps the citizens lighten up and pulls them out of that fog.

I would go into more context with this, but I don’t know how much it will be stirring the plot and how important it is. All I know is that McMurphy is practically trying to get the Big Nurse to flip her lid. She did it once already, and after a bit it seemed like his antics were calming down when he realized that she’d probably extend his time at the hospital. Then, SURPRISE, he just screwed her over again. I kind of feel bad for her, having to deal with all this. However, I gotta stick to that protagonist side. Can’t waver too much. She’s being made out to be such a bad guy too so to keep things simple for me, I’m just gonna hang around McMurphy’s side (though it seems like the poor girl’s just doing her job).