Approach to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

Ayşe Gözde Uğur

Istanbul Aydin University (Turkey)

This research will examine the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey in relation to Michel Foucault’s discourses on discipline and punish. How people living in that period obeyed to exist in society will be shown to the reader through the people in the mental hospital in the novel. In this regard, Nurse Ratched’s ability to establish authority over the patients to maintain order and her efforts to eliminate those who do not comply with this order will be elaborated within the framework of Foucauldian analysis. The study highlights this categorization by providing examples from the novel, differentiating between ‘recoverable’ and ‘non-recoverable’ patients, representing individuals who can adapt to society and those who cannot. The surveillance and power dynamics of the nurse in the novel, as they relate to the patients, will be examined in detail. The concepts of how those who disobey the rules are punished by authority and the resulting resistance and rebellion will be emphasized. The panopticon metaphor, which plays a crucial role in Foucault’s analyses of discipline and punish, is exemplified in Kesey’s novel, where the patients in the mental hospital are kept under constant surveillance by Ratched. The study will provide an in-depth understanding to the reader, supported by primary and secondary sources throughout the research phase. The novel aims to provide literary examples that reflect the realities of the period in which it was written by questioning social punishment through Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance.

Article link: https://www.asianinstituteofresearch.org/JSParchives/approach-to-one-flew-over-the-cuckoo’s-nest-by-foucault’s-discipline-and-punish