I’m curious to know everyone’s thoughts on Chief Bromden as an unreliable narrator and whether we as readers are inclined to believe his version of reality. By pretending to be deaf and dumb he alerts the reader to the fact that he is capable of lying, but we also get the sense that in his personal account of his time in the ward he is being as honest as possible. Things get complicated as his accounts of the fog in Part I get more and more preposterous, culminating in the scene of the floating chairs starting on page 115; when Nurse Ratchet turns the dial and slows down time on page 68; and when Bromden has the dream about the furnaces on page 77. He believes he is seeing and experiencing all of these things, but the behavior of the other characters—the night watchman telling him he’s having a bad dream, or the other patients making fun of him for drifting off during a meeting—suggests that these are all incidents that occur solely in Bromden’s mind. I think the narrative is more effective this way though; it is the reality of his hallucinations that most vividly convey his suffering in the ward, more so than if the story were told from a purely objective point of view from a narrator we can depend on. Which leads me to the question of: what constitutes reality? Obviously that’s too broad a question to answer in a blog post but it’s curious, isn’t it, that the more time we spend in Bromden’s head the less sure we are of what reality is and how it correlates to perceived insanity, severe mental illness… or even more common diagnoses like depression and anxiety.