Hallucinations In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

A man sprints through a dense forest, escaping an unknown terror pursuing him through the darkness from the treetops. As he keeps looking back, he cannot see what is chasing him, but he assumes it must be close behind him. Suddenly, his foot is snared by a protruding tree trunk and he lands face first on the tiled floor of his mental-care facility. His nurse helps him up and regrets mentioning to the man that she just recently adopted a child from Vietnam, which caused him to lash out. Obviously, the man suffered through a hallucination of his past in the Vietnam War, triggered through the nurse’s mere comment. He has done this and will continue to do this for years to come. This is because society forces the individual, through the aid of

the individual’s fears, to enter hallucinant states which cause the same individual to lash out.
Everyone has fears, and it is through these fears that they obtain their hallucinations. These fears all originate from what psychologists call the primal fears, or the five fears that all other fears derive from, extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego-death. In one way or another, Edgar Allen Poe explicitly used all five of these within his poetry, including The Raven. Throughout The Raven, Poe’s narrator believes he has brought his wife back from the dead, although this only results in self-inflicted suffering (Poe 10-11). This suffering culminated from his fear of losing his wife, and he does not wish to accept her death, so he tried bringing her back from the dead. Consequently, he began to hallucinate and believe he was seeing her ghostly image. His own fears brought this hallucination upon him. This causation of hallucinations through fears can even extend to one’s fear in the safety of future generations, such as with Thoreau and his masterpiece Walden. Within his eclectic novel, he writes of his worries for society and how the actions of everyone will generate a world where peace cannot be found. He continues to address how citizens living beneath unjust conditions must deliberately act against these unjust laws (Thoreau 220-224). In fact, Frodo, the main protagonist from the Lord of The Rings series, is a prime example of an individual voicing his rights, as defined by Thoreau, and it drives him to madness. While travelling through the land of Middle Earth to reach Mordor where he will attempt to trust the Ring into the volcano, he is driven to craziness by the power of the Ring (Tolkien 1237). At times, Frodo was so petrified by the Ring that its power nearly pushed his hallucinations over the edge and his soul into oblivion. Fears, whether imaginary or real, are powerful creations of man.
The fears of an individual, pressured by society, force the individual to experience hallucinations and begin to spiral their world into absolute insanity.

This can be as simple as a man with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) being reminded of his traumatizing experience by other individuals. Coincidentally, this is what Chief Bromden suffers from within the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Unfortunately, the facility he resides in does not assist him in any way, and how it operates has a resemblance closer to a prison than a hospital. Chief experiences many hallucinations, and, more often than not, they begin with a thick layer of fog which blurs his vision. This fog is usually accompanied by other hallucinations including the sounds of air raid sirens, people around him beginning to look larger, and beliefs that things are what they are not. These situations are always created by those around him, such as Nurse Ratched, promoting the idea that society is what pushes people to have hallucinations. However, some individuals are not mentally ill, and are still subjected to the pressures of society. Thoreau, the believer of the downfall of society, was not a nutcase; he was simply pushed over the edge by his critics. Thoreau was so disgusted, he packed his bags, left town, and lived in the woods with no company (Thoreau ____). The same incident occurred within Poe’s The Raven when the man featured in the story was subjected to listen to the raven until he reached insanity (Poe ___). The only difference was that this man could not escape from his hallucinations like Thoreau could. He was trapped, and societal pressure would torment him for

eternity.