Clarity

My artwork is showing the scene from pages 141-143. Bromden wakes up not seeing any of his hallucinations for the first time in a long while. As he looks around, he states, “A window was up, and the air in the dorm was clear and had a taste to it made me feel kind of giddy and drunk, gave me this sudden yen to get up out of bed and do something.” Bromden had never been able to get a good look at the outside. He looks out the window and “saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country.” Bromden takes in as many details of the outside as he can, most of which I portrayed in my artwork(141).

The first thing Bromden noticed was the moon low in the sky over the pastureland. He talks about the moon, saying that “the face of it was scarred and cuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon.”(141) Because of that, I made sure to include lots of trees in the horizon that were tall enough to cover parts of the moon.

Bromden then notes that the stars in the sky were pale next to the moon, but ”they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon.”(142) In my artwork, I made the stars closest to the moon barely noticeable and get brighter when they were away from it.

Later on, Bromden notices the geese flying in the sky. He mentions a lead goose, which for a moment “was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing”(143). Keeping that in mind, I drew a goose in the shape of a black cross in the middle of the moon, making the other geese behind it a lighter color, making sure the attention was on the goose in the middle.

With all these details, the most important one that I included is the window screen mesh. The mesh serves the purpose of reminding the viewer that Bromden is still stuck inside the hospital, unable to get any closer to the trees or look up at the sky.

This scene is significant to the story as it’s the only moment in the book so far where Bromden’s head clears up, and his vision is not affected by fog. For once in a long time, he’s not being tormented by his hallucinations. Bromden looks out into the world he hasn’t been out into in years. The scene sparks happy memories into his brain, reminding him of calmer times with his family, looking up at the sky. This moment of clarity can result in grounding Bromden in reality once more, or it can act as a small taste of freedom, pushing him to want to escape the terrors of the hospital and go out into the world once again.