"Peep" - A Visual of the Staff Meeting

For this Lit Log, I created a visual representation for pages 130-132 of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. During this section, Chief Bromden enters the ward’s staff room to begin cleaning while the staff prepares for their meeting.

The scene starts with Bromden on his way to the staff room, water bucket and sponge in hand. The Big Nurse suddenly zooms past him to wait beyond the door. Out in the hallway, he notices “how clear it is–no fog any place [p.130].” As often as Bromden’s fog reoccurs, there was no reason to include it in this particular visual.

Bromden walks up to the staff room door and looks through the peephole, which is why I decided to use a fisheye perspective for this visual and is part of where I got the artwork title from. Although there’s no peephole present when Bromden actually starts to clean the room, I figured the unique perspective would be a neat call back to what happened right beforehand.

For the colors used, the staff room is described as having a “green seepage,” and that “it’ll be all over the walls and windows by the time the meeting is halfway through [p.130].” On top of the green background, I also gave the drawing a dingy look with subtle stain textures. Bromden himself is inverted from the green color, which was mainly just so he could stand out but also because of his uniqueness in this situation. The room is filled with staff members, and Bromden is the only patient there.

That brings us to the Big Nurse, Nurse Ratched, who is staring at Bromden skeptically for raising his hand with McMurphy earlier and indirectly suggesting that he isn’t actually deaf. This is also a part of where I got the artwork title from. During his wall scrubbing, Bromden tells us that he can “still feel [Nurse Ratched] standing at the door and drilling into [his] skull till in a minute she’s going to break through, till [he’s] just about to give up and yell and tell them everything if she don’t take those eyes off [him] [p.131].” To communicate this, I decided to have the nurse’s eyes glow sharply while giving Bromden a nervous facial expression in front of her.

After a few moments of watching Bromden clean, the nurse “realizes that she’s being stared at too–by all the rest of the staff [p.132].” Some of them sit in the background with their coffee and cigarettes, impatiently waiting to get the meeting rolling.

A miscellaneous detail regarding the visual is that Bromden lifts his sponge “up above [his] head so everybody in the room can see how it’s covered with green slime and how hard [he’s] working [p.132].” There was also a film of this book (that I forgot about over the years), so I based Bromden’s and Big Nurse’s designs loosely on those of the actors.

Some things that I would have liked to include in this visual are the patients who “materialized in the flesh [p.131],” as well as the strained table legs and knotted chairs that Bromden describes, but because they don’t necessarily happen in this particular staff meeting, I decided to include different things instead.

In conclusion, the nurse’s stare and Bromden’s discomfort of being singled out are the two things that are portrayed most in this scene. This is significant because we later witness Bromden actually use his voice with McMurphy, proving that he was never deaf. It makes the nurse’s skepticism all the more meaningful, considering we now have other people that can spoil Bromden’s secret.