Literary Haze

Fog: a thick cloud of tiny water droplets suspended in the atmosphere at or near the earth's surface that obscures or restricts visibility  
Fog clouds and blinds humanity. It is uncontrollable by most means and it is just an occurrence of nature. Some days are foggier than others, making things more or less visible. Chief Bromden, the narrator of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, employs the word fog as a metaphor of his situation. When the Big Nurse and her Black Boys shave Bromden he hallucinates being surrounded by fog in the midst of his paranoid. After getting shaved and put to sleep with medication, Bromden says ,"When the fog clears to where I can see, I'm sitting in the day room. They didn't take me to the Shock Shop this time. I remember they took me out of the shaving room and locked me in Seclusion" (page 8). Before the fog completely blurred Bromden, he was screaming in fear, but after being completely clouded by "fog" he was himself again. His fears were overcome by medication and fog. By not knowing what he lived he evaded suffering. "One of these days I’ll quit straining and let myself go completely, lose myself in the fog the way some of the other Chronics have, but…" (page 37). Bromden faces two options: stress about being medically treated by the insensitive staff or simply going along with whatever insanity puts before him. Kesey's use of the metaphor of fog gives a much more profound meaning to this word. As of now I see it as a deviation from suffering in unavoidable conditions, like it is in this ward, but one can not simply avoid insanity. Fog could potentially be a cure to insanity or insanity, or maybe the patients' escape of the hospital.

Mood is affected by a variety of factors, one of them being sound. Bromden does not talk a lot with others and fakes being deaf. As he was approached for his shaving he began to scream, but what mood does the fog he faces give to the novel? Even though he was stressed, the fog seems rather comforting for him. Faking deafness Bromden takes a stand of solitude apart the rest of the hospital. Sound is essential for everything, but faking it seems like part of the fog. It is part of avoiding suffering by being talked to. Insanity is accompanied by sound, but Bromden deviates from it. When Bromden was completely blinded by fog, it felt as if he simply gave in and everything went back to normal. He had no need to scream anymore.