Foucauldian Reading Of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest has enjoyed considerable success since its publication in1962. The story takes place in a mental hospital which is a microcosm of America in the1960s, illustrating a story of how a highly individualistic man named McMurphy overturns the senseless and dehumanizing routines of the mental hospital. The novel reflects the negative and depressing aspects of American society and problematic nature of the mental asylum. Therefore the theme of this novel tries to interpret man’s rebellion against socially imposed repression and man’s pursuit of freedom from repressive authority.Starting from studying those marginalized being such as prison and mental hospital, Michel Foucault elucidates the issue of people’s existential state and freedom. He not only criticizes people’s enslaved situation, but also explores the ways by which people can be freed from constraint and enslavement. He elaborately discusses modern disciplinary power in which all subjects are chronicled, documented, and identified. In the late period of his study, he turns his research on technologies of power domination to technologies of self-domination which is the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the principle of caring of the self. Throughout his life, he concerns the survival condition of modern people and proposes to lead a more ethical and free life for those who are trapped in modern technique of power.What Michel Foucault concerns, such as the phenomenon of madness, modern disciplinary power, subversion of power and the pursuit of freedom, are best represented in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Pointing at the fact that the insanity is contained in the discourse of knowledge of sanity and individual is oppressed more covertly and "scientifically" in modern disciplinary society, the aim of this thesis is to disclose how human nature is oppressed by modern psychiatry and how freedom is constrained by modern institution. At the same time, by applying Foucault’s theory of resistance and aesthetics of existence, the present author is also dedicated to interpreting how the patients undermine and minimize the Big Nurse’s power and dictatorship through their consistent and persistent activities of resistance, and how they contest the normalizing power by means of self-technologies.Through making the above-mentioned investigation, this thesis tries to reveal how the subjects originally constituted by power transform themselves into the ethical-constituted subjects who are the real master of themselves.