Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, portrays the narrator, Chief Bromden, to be a large powerful man. However, he believes he is small and weak. Bromden is fully capable of hearing and comprehending what is going on, and of speaking - yet he poses to be a deaf-mute. Throughout his life he has noticed that people paid no attention to him; they treated him as if he didn't exist. So the Chief gradually gave up on trying to communicate with the outside world and retreated into his subjective fantasies. .
Fog is a phenomenon that clouds our vision of the world. In this novel, fogs symbolize a lack of insight and an escape from reality. When Bromden starts to slip away from reality, because of his medication or out of fear, he hallucinates fog drifting into the ward. He imagines that there are hidden fog machines in the vents and that the staff controls them. When things get out of hand, Nurse Ratched turns on the war-surplus fog machine in the walls, and everyone becomes lost in the fog. Although it can be frightening at times, Bromden considers the fog to be a safe place; he can hide in it and ignore reality. Beyond what it means for Bromden, the fog represents the state of mind that Ratched imposes on the patients with her strict, mind-numbing routines and humiliating treatment.
Machines dominate Chief Bromden's fantasies, and so, consequently, are the images of the novel. The machine is seen as something that is the opposite if everything that is natural. The "Combine," the name the Chief gives to organized society, is a term for a threshing machine, used for mowing down and harvesting wheat. When Nurse Ratched is angry, she is compared to a diesel truck run amok, smelling of burning oil. The machines in the Shock Shop are used to punish patients who step out of line; and machines are installed in the wall of the ward, and even in the patients themselves, to keep everything running according to the Combines plan.
