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Paranoia In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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The paper attempts to analyze the novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by considering the term paranoia as a postmodern condition that prevails in most of the American novels since 1960s. The paper proceeds from the analysis of the term paranoia and then examines how the concept suits the novel’s settings. Paranoia is one of the more prominent issues taken up by contemporary North American novelists since 1960. Writers as divergent in matters of style and subject as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Diane Johnson, Joseph McElroy, John Barth, Kathy Acker, Saul Bellow, Marge Piercy, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Ishmael Reed, and Margaret Atwood have also attempted to represent paranoid characters, communities, schemes, and lifestyles; history, technology and religion in their novels, says Patrick O’ Donnel in the article titled Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative(181) . Leo Bersani in the article titled Pynchon, Paranoia and Literature states that the “the word paranoia has had an extraordinarily complex medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic history” (99). Paranoia is a Greek word designating a distracted …show more content…

The first act that he does is to rejuvenate the spirit of the inmates with his hilarious attitude. He asserts “…what I came to this establishment for, to bring you birds fun an’ entertainement”(11). He realizes that the first act to be done in a panic stricken world is to bring back laughter, one of the gifts human being forgot in their life. In the essay ‘Salvation Through Laughter: Ken Kesey and the Cuckoo’s Nest Stephen L. Tanner suggests that this differentiate Mcmurphy and the inmates of the asylum. There is no place for laughter in the Big Nurse’s smooth running machinery of manipulation, and the patients are conditioned in such a way that they are afraid of laughter (58). McMurphy views it as the daunting task ahead of him and he

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