One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Craig Noe
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a very interesting as well as confusing novel. After the patients are put to bed, Chief Broom, the narrator, is hallucinating. He imagines that one of the black boys, who act as security for the hospital, flick a switch and the patients’ room is sent down into the ground below the hospital. Broom feels the room falling and spinning lower and lower until it stops and he sees a factory full of robotic humans walking around in unison doing various work activities. Broom experiences a worker grab one of the patients and hang them on a hook by his heel. The patient is dangling there and then a man with a knife cuts open the patient’s body and kills him immediately. Broom expects to be sick because of the blood and guts, but he sees nothing fall out. The Chief is confused and starts to see fog fill up the room and suddenly the illusion disappears.
This is a confusing part in the book because you cannot tell if this is actually real or an illusion. Chief Broom has had experiences in the past of hallucinating which is why he is in the mental hospital. The fog in his hallucinations represents that what he is seeing is not actually real and means that he is returning back to real life. I believe that you will see this quite a bit in the remainder of the book. The Chief sees the robots because he thinks that the nurses and workers turn patients into robots so they can, “rule the world” so to speak. The robots are involved in all of his hallucinations so far and I think that will continue throughout the book.