Deleuze and Guattari

This study offers a re-reading of Ken Kesey’s oeuvre, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, employing Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics of Face and their concept of regime of signs; it tries to map the workings of Face as an impersonal despotic system that emerges from the mixture of two regimes of signs that facilitates surveillance, discrimination and control. It also pinpoints the potentiality and activities of escape from this system, and the emergence of signs of disruptive faciality. Analyzing the facial activities of three characters in the novel, namely, Nurse Ratched, Chief Bromden and Randel McMurphy, the study elaborates on the following facial aspects: the State’s policies of facialization in Nurse Ratched; the schizoid experience of faciality in Chief Bromden and the suspense of the face system in McMurphy. Besides the produced mappings, the reader also meets a set of newly conceptualized functionalities of faces, contributed by the particular signs this context provides, namely, the catatonic face, the synaptic face and the carnivalesque faces.

The main purpose of this essay is to investigate the role of becoming through political and social factors among the main character’s changing identity in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. The researcher intends to depict the effects of political factors on the re-territorialization and territorialization of the main character through the framework of Deleuze’s theory. The current essay focuses on No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe to discover how becoming and transformation of identity take place throughout the novel and how the main character of the novel is going through constant change and becoming which are the result of different forces. Moreover, the researcher intends to investigate the character’s desires that result in the becoming process of identity deriving from social and capitalist factors in society. Since Deleuze and Guattari’s distinctive definition of literature investigates how minor literature is produced in the dominant narratives of major literature, it can critically assist the present research to discuss that Achebe prepares the ground for indigenous, anticolonial voices in his novel No Longer at Ease. It can be concluded that the main character of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease is in flux due to different forces, and his identity goes through constant becoming.