Lit log

Lit Log Prompt #1 As a reader, having Bromden as a narrator sometimes makes me sometimes think of how I have perceived moments in my past and how my mental state or personal agenda affected how I could retell situations or in this case narrate.

For Bromden, the fog serves as the thing that affects his perception the most, it is something that only he is affected by, but it is something that he truly believes in because his mind is so deluded by it, for a small period of reading I almost believed it may have been real. After all, Bromden is our only source of narration, we soon find out that Bromden is not all there. After all, certain things start not to make sense when he’s explaining them and how no one else experiences the fog, and even further beyond that, we start to understand where this fog comes from. It stems from his trauma during the war of the fog machines that would be used to cover the battlefield during battle, there would be bombings and you would often have to listen for sounds in order to know where you were going, Bromden was clearly damaged from this but in a way where he would use it as a safety ploy when he gets put in a stressful situation he often resorts to it and is consumed by it, it isn’t until McMurphy pulls him out of it that he himself realizes or perhaps acknowledges that he was blinding himself by allowing the fog to consume him because after this he started to speak for himself, a slight feeling I have is that the fog is also something of a metaphor for the big nurses influence or the fear he has of her, even when he’s pulled out of its effects by McMurphy he still wants to rely on it desperately, going as far to say that maybe it wasn’t the best idea allowing him to take him away from it, feeling safer when under its influence.

For Me, I obviously won’t say I’m as traumatized as Bromden or that I’m even traumatized in the first place, however, I can see similarities in how I handle stressful situations to his “fog”, I know myself to be someone who in stressful situations that if I feel like I can’t handle it I just try to remove myself from it at all costs, obviously I can’t make fog appear or imagine it but I say in a similar way I can understand how his perception has become affected because of his past, I feel like he mentally whether consciously or subconsciously, uses or used the fog to hide both his stress while simultaneously stopping himself from being who he wants to be.