Trapped

In Part 1, page 7, Bromden reveals a flashback to the readers about a memory when his father (“Papa”) and he went hunting for birds. He then describes the movement of the prey they’re hunting for, “The bird [is] safe as long as he keeps still… Then the bird breaks, feathers springing, jumps out of the cedar into the birdshot from my Papa’s gun.)” In the end, the bird dies. In my drawing, I drew exactly what happened to that bird. But the only difference is that this bird is still alive; Bromden is the bird, and the one who shot him is the Big Nurse. I relate Bromden to the bird, because he said it himself, “The least black boy and one of the bigger ones catch me before I get ten steps out of the mop closet, and drag me back to the shaving room. I don’t fight or make any noise.” He did what a prey could’ve done in that situation. I relate to the individual who shot the bird, originally Papa, as the Big Nurse. In Part 1, page 25, Bromden states what he calls the “huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside,” as the “Combine”. So when it came to the “Inside” of the hospital and who was in charge, Bromden brought up how he thinks she’s “Working alongside others like her who I call the “Combine,”… to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside.” She is the only one who has the power to shoot Bromden and the others in the hospital.

I specifically drew the bird in a glass case display, because there is a moment where Bromden grows as a character, finally opening his eyes to his surroundings and others. He says, “For the first time in years I was seeing people with none of that black outline they used to have, and one night I was even able to see out the windows.” The bird is drawn to be looking in the distance like how Bromden did that one night. Not only did I draw to try and convey the way Bromden realized this eye-opening experience she has never felt, but to show how small the space he’s been in for the past years of his life. This man has been living in a confined space for most of his life, trapped in a building he can wander in for only so long. For the stylistic part of my drawing, I tried to give it a look of realism, yet smudgy. A combination of the drawing of Cheswick on page 12, the streakyness yet realism of it. And on page 46 of Pete, the charcoal look of that utilizes the smudgeness of it. The reasoning behind the lack of color within my drawing is not only to mimic the little color in materials Bromden had to create these drawings of the people in the hospital. But also to show the pain that Bromden had to go through, specifically for therapy (ECT), “I’ve heard that the Chief, years ago, received more than two hundred shock treatments when they were really the vogue.” (page 62).