Who Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest?

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey's debut in literature in 1962, is the distinguished masterpiece among Kesey's works. This thesis attempts to analyze the operation of the ward by employing Foucault's physiological thinking on madness and prison in order to reveal the disciplinary society in the novel. The question will be probed into about the novel, that is, who flew over the cuckoo's nest?First, patients on the ward are examined in the thesis. The result of this careful observation is that neither of them are psychopaths from the perspective of medicine science. Being deviant from the norm of society makes them marked as the mad and then isolated from the society. Next the treatments on the ward are analyzed. The recovery-oriented cures are actually disciplines in the prison, which aim at producing docile body, the identical"machines"in the novel. The outcome of this dehumanizing management and treatments is doomed to be rebellions and struggles of the patients against the ward. Last, it is pointed out in the thesis that the consequence of the struggle, however, is not as the title has indicated that"one flew over the cuckoo's nest". Nobody ever flew over the cuckoo's nest. The whole society, to Foucault, is a huge, continuous carceral network, which reaches all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society. Schools, hospitals and factories are all part of the disciplinary mechanism. The patients on the ward flew over one cuckoo's nest, but flew into another nest.Employing the relative thinking of Foucault to the interpretation of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest can not only offer us a new horizon to broaden study on this novel but also provide a literary interpretation of Foucault's theories. The striking similarity enable us to deepen the understanding of Foucault's philosophical text through the literary text of this novel.