Chief Bromden's Life in a Mental Institution
             Chief Bromden is half American Indian. His father was a chief named Tee Ah Millatoona, which means The-pine-that-stands-tallest-on-the-mountain. That is why he is able to use the title chief. He took on his mother's last name of Bromden. He grew up in the Columbian gorge. Chief Bromden, the narrator is the most interesting character in the story because of his way to conceal his intelligence.
             He was put in a mental institution after World War II. The chief was an electrician's assistant in a training camp before the army shipped him off to Germany. It was probably due to working with electronics and the added strain of going to war that led the chief to have such an unhealthy preoccupation with electronics.
             The chief has led everyone in the hospital, both staff and patients to believe he is deaf and dumb. As a young child he was always ignored by fellow students and adults. This could have been because he was so strange looking, being half American Indian and appearing so big and menacing yet being quite shy. "I had to keep acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all." He felt rejected by his peers throughout life and so as an adult decided that as people acted like he was invisible he might as well disappear, "It wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all." So pretending to be deaf and dumb was probably a defense mechanism. For him, his silence was also extremely potent. He was able to hear everything that was going on in the meetings where the doctors and nurses discussed the future of the patients. The doctors and nurses didn't hesitate to say anything in front of him because they didn't think he can't hear. "They don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby because they think I'm deaf and dumb," Bromdan said. This sentence explains the way Bromdan used his self ...