One Flew Over the Invisible Man's Cuckoo's Nest

It is slightly suspicious how Invisible Man and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest not only share a message of criticism towards suppressive societies but also an alarming amount of similar details. Throughout the first chapters of Invisible Man, people who have read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest begin to realize that both narrators share their invisibility and lack of personality and courage. Nevertheless, this can happen with a lot other novels as well. What is interesting, beyond both novels' message, is how particularly alike both messages are expressed.

Readers start off making a connection between the Invisible Man and Chief Brondem because of their personalities and, as previously stated, because of their invisibility. The importance of this connection vanishes for a couple of chapters until, in one concise yet striking sentence, the veteran tells the narrator, "Come out of the fog, young man" (153).  Almost intuitively, I was brought back to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where Chief Brondem finds himself lost and trapped within a figurative fog while us readers can only but wish he'd come out of the fog. Do these two fogs deliver a similar message? First, we know that both fogs are clearly figurative. Second, we know that both characters are in a submissive position where their complaisant behavior has made of them vulnerable, segregated men with no intention whatsoever of making themselves be heard. What the fog that surrounds both characters is trying to represent is how blinded and trapped they are in their own society. Both, unable to stand up for themselves, now face societal suppression, represented more subtly as fog.

As I continued to read, having this allusion in mind, I came across the Invisible Man's clinical experience. He describes to be lying on a hospital bed with only white people around him; doctors, who I perceive as slightly evil due to the narrator's spasmodic hallucinations and hyperbolic depictions. This reminded me once more of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Chief Brondem experience in Disturbance was not really that different. He would be tied to a bed, and, although tortured with ElectroShock Therapy every once in a while, he'd have recurrent hallucinations and only white, ill-intended nurses around him. Although the Invisible Man is being cured while Brondem was being tortured, both scenarios portray the characters as vulnerable and unimportant to their caretakers. This shows how segregated groups of people, whether it is blacks or indians or lunatics, are alien to societal interests; a black patient is harshly treated and mocked while trying to recuperate from a concussion while an indian is villainy tortured for hallow reasons.

Finally, the lobotomy. Doctors in Invisible Man consider it appropriate for the narrator to undergo a lobotomy and doctors in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest actually performed one in Randal McMurphy. Lobotomies are a highly controversial medical procedure in which most of the brain's frontal lobe is removed; that is, the place where most of our personal characteristics lie is cut out. This procedure, now highly unpopular, received a lot of criticism during the second half of the twentieth century because it would cause severe side effects on its patients; however, it was commonly known for successfully dealing with behavioral and psychiatric issues in patients. The fact that a lobotomy is being planned for a black and that it was done on a "lunatic" shows just how margined these people are and how invisible they are to society. A doctor even says it in Invisible Man, "It would be very different if the patient were a white Harvard student", meaning the procedure would perhaps be a lot less invading and damaging if they were treating with a white, educated person that with a black, unidentified man. This is unacceptable; a lobotomy should not be performed on a black or on a lunatic just because they are dark-colored or crazy. Clearly, the intentions of putting these patients through the torture of a lobotomy goes beyond the desire to cure them; what doctors are basically doing is cutting away the brain tissue that makes them them, consequently modeling them into being more submissive and complaisant.

It is unlikely that Ralph Ellison and Ken Kesey agreed to make the same type of references and deliver a similar message in their novels; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published nearly thirty years after Invisible Man. Nonetheless, this pivotal coincidence allows readers to understand the meaning behind the novel's title, for example, by relating Invisible Man with Chief Brondem's experience. Themes are endless, but what is interesting is how the ways in which these themes are delivered are also sometimes equally timeless.