Previous
Idioms
Definition of Imagery
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition
Part One
Explanation and Analysis—Dam Breaking:
In Part One, McMurphy's arrival begins to incite an attitude of rebellion in the patients, including Bromden, who have long accepted their place at the bottom of the hierarchy on the ward. Bromden lies in bed unmedicated for the first night in years, and he describes the sound of the ward with imagery that foreshadows major changes to come:
Not a sound across the hospital—except for a dull, padded rumbling somewhere deep in the guts of the building, a sound that I never noticed before—a lot like the sound you hear when you’re standing late at night on top of a big hydroelectric dam. Low, relentless, brute power.
It is possible that the boiler or other machinery in the building is really making a rumbling sound, and it is just as possible that Bromden is imagining the sound. Whether or not the sound is really there, what Bromden hears in the hospital is the sound of the hydroelectric dam that completely changed the ecosystem of his childhood home on the Columbia River. The dam symbolizes many things for Bromden. It stands for the way the United States has exerted destructive control over his people and their way of life. It symbolizes industrial development of many species' natural habitat. It symbolizes his father's turn to alcoholism and the grief that led to the end of his parents' marriage. And it symbolizes the societal forces that have traumatized him and led him to dissociate into hallucinations of fog.
What Bromden and the reader know in the back of their minds, however, is that dams break. They are built to harness the "low, relentless, brute power" of a river and convert it into electricity. The sound of the dam's power is also the sound of the river's power; that sound promises that one day, if the dam breaks, the river would come rushing forth again in full force. When Bromden hears the sound of a hydroelectric dam on the ward, he hears the sound of patients who are powering Nurse Ratched and who are simmering with their own "low, relentless, brute power," just waiting to break free.
Related Themes:
Part Two
Explanation and Analysis—Whir of Fear:
In Part Two, Bromden's fog lifts enough that he is able to look out the window and see the countryside at night for the first time in years. He uses imagery to contrast what he observes outside with his experience inside the hospital:
I held my breath and I could hear the flap of his big paws on the grass as he loped; then I could hear a car speed up out of a turn. The headlights loomed over the rise and peered ahead down the highway. [...]
The dog was almost to the rail fence at the edge of the grounds when I felt somebody slip up behind me. [...] I heard a whir of fear start up in my head. The black boy took my arm and pulled me around. “I’ll get ‘im,” he says.
Bromden has been keeping silent, pretending to be deaf, and trying to be as invisible as possible for years. In trying to disappear, he has developed hallucinations of fog. The fog deadens his sight, his hearing, and every other sense, almost as though he and the rest of the world are hidden from each other. Bromden uses imagery to capture the transformative experience of looking out the window. He sees the dog and hears its paws "flap" on the grass. He hears a car turn and maybe even remembers the feeling of riding in a car as it accelerates. He sees distant headlights. Earlier in the passage, he even imagines everything the dog is smelling on the breeze and in the dirt. This multisensory experience of the environment is unlike any Bromden has described having in the hospital.
By contrast, as soon as Bromden feels Geever and Nurse Pilbow pulling him back from the window, he hears "a whir of fear start up in my head." This whir is still an image, drawing on Bromden and the reader's sense of sound. However, this image is rooted in Bromden's inner paranoia instead of his physical environment. No longer is Bromden using his physical senses to connect with his environment. Now, the "whir" that starts up in his head dampens his senses and drives him back into hiding within himself. In juxtaposition with Bromden's lucid description of the scene outside, this fearful "whir" demonstrates that the hospital itself, and the staff's attempts to control the patients, is exacerbating Bromden's mental illness.
Related Themes:
Part Four
Explanation and Analysis—McMurphy's Surrender:
In Part Four, after McMurphy rips Nurse Ratched's uniform, he lets out a cry of surrender. Bromden uses imagery to describe the sound McMurphy makes:
He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out:
A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care any more about anything but himself and his dying.
For all that McMurphy is known as a disruptive patient, he has always kept control of his emotions and affect. He laughs when Nurse Ratched tries to make him feel powerless, and he makes calculated adjustments to his behavior when he learns that she might be able to keep him committed indefinitely. In this scene, McMurphy has charged Nurse Ratched, broken a window, and ripped her uniform. Still, Bromden remarks that McMurphy has kept the air of a "sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not." The cry is the first time in the novel that McMurphy has surrendered not only to the hospital staff, but also to the full force of his own emotions.
The animalistic distress in McMurphy's cry does not make him come across as less-than-human. On the contrary, McMurphy transforms in this moment into his most natural, human self—as opposed to the cruel machine of the Combine, which will stop at nothing to chew these men up and spit them out. He has done all he possibly can to lead Nurse Ratched on a wild goose chase and to show the other men on the ward how to resist her. In this final moment, he can only be a scared animal who knows he is about to lose everything to the Combine.
This cry is the last Bromden or the others see or hear from McMurphy until Nurse Ratched has him returned to the floor post-lobotomy. The lobotomy strips McMurphy of his personality, his speech, and his responsiveness, rendering him what Bromden has referred to throughout as a "vegetable." The point at which a mentally disabled or even brain-dead person loses their personhood has been a point of intense emotional debate for decades, but there is no doubt that the lobotomy strips McMurphy of the ability to ever cry out in such an animalistic way again.
Related Themes:
