Hazy

Chief Bromden, the main character and narrator in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, describes his experience with a heavy fog that drives him crazy and doesn't let him see anything around him. He uses many different feelings and allusions to narrate how the fog falls over and embraces him. But even though the Chief uses a lot of details to describe this episode, readers still have a question lingering through their minds: What is the fog?

The Chief explains the fog more clearly on page 7, where the black boys are cutting his hair. He sees it as thick snow that doesn't let him move and hurts his temples, but his descriptions leave a lot of room for the reader to draw their own conclusions about it. In class, we came up with a few ideas. The first one, the simplest of all, is that the fog could be simply water vapor coming out of a spray gun to moisten his hair, and that in his own head he sees it as something terrible. Maybe it's an effect of a drug they give him in order for the Chief to be calm during his hair cut. In the introduction, Hesey talks about the CIA using experimental drugs on psychiatric patients, so this could be a reasonable explanation. 

Another is that it could be just an illusion. Just something triggered by his mind, an element that because of past traumas is present every time they cut his hair. He does allude to war terms and actions, which could be a sign that he was involved a war; the event could spark a reaction in his mind involving a dense fog and war scenes. 

This scene also reminds me of a very good song by Radiohead that my dad showed me. Here is the link.