This paper analyzes Bakhtin’s carnivalesque in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘carnivalesque’ refers to a source of ‘liberation, destruction, and renewal.’ The origin and meaning of the carnivalesque can be best understood by analyzing the concept of the carnival. In the carnival, social hierarchies of everyday life are profaned and overturned by suppressed voices and energies. Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque in literature to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of the popular culture which sought a release, a freedom from all that is official, authoritarian, and serious. The setting of both the novels satisfies the criteria of the carnivalesque. While Golding’s novel highlights the intricacies of life through a group of English school children on a marooned island, Kesey’s novel revolves around the life in an Oregon mental asylum, reflecting the capitalistic and non-humanistic tendency of human life. Both the novels are rich in the carnivalesque, and concern the degradation of man in the world and the attempts made at the revival of the human spirit. The paper attempts to compare the two chosen novels in terms of the carnivalesque elements like inversion, degradation, food, madness, and games, thereby highlighting the carnivalesque nature of the novels.

The intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century in Europe and America was conducive to the rise of many genres of fiction. Loss of established values, an important part of the carnivalesque, became a prominent topic for discussion among thinkers and writers. As a subject of discussion, it grew out of the tensions and contradictions that exercised the imagination for a long time. It can be emphasized here that many of the experiences that seem so startlingly innovative are anchored in the past. It is a peculiarly frequent and appropriate phenomenon in culture and literature. In literature, the reasons for the carnival phenomenon stem from the history of the nation itself, and the consequent tensions in society and the character, especially in the postwar social fabric. The theme of carnivalesque has been exploited consciously/unconsciously to highlight the intricacies of the period and the human life.

The origin and meaning of the term carnivalesque can be best understood by analyzing the concept of carnival. Carnival can be traced to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival originally of the sub-deacons of the cathedral, held about the Feast of Circumcision (January 1), in which the humbler cathedral officials burlesqued the sacred ceremonies. Bakhtin’s carnivalesque is an extension of the atmosphere that appeared during carnival in the Renaissance. According to Bakhtin (1968, 199), . . . carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.