narrative cognition

This study examines how linguistic style in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath enacts psychological disturbance through formal textual mechanisms. Drawing on Foregrounding Theory, cognitive narratology, and clinical psycholinguistics, it investigates how stylistic deviations—such as metaphor saturation, syntactic fragmentation, referential ambiguity, and narrative disjunction—function as mimetic simulations of schizophrenia and depression. Through a mixed-methods approach that integrates close literary analysis with corpus-based annotation tools, the research analyzes selected passages for psycholinguistic markers associated with mental illness, including deictic confusion, lexical minimalism, and temporal distortion. Chief Bromden’s hallucinatory narration and Esther Greenwood’s affectively flattened voice are shown to linguistically instantiate psychosis and depressive cognition, respectively. The study contributes to interdisciplinary understandings of literature as a diagnostic interface, demonstrating that literary texts do not merely represent mental illness but cognitively perform it. Ultimately, this research offers a novel framework for analyzing narrative pathology, expanding the analytical reach of cognitive stylistics and underscoring literature’s potential to model and communicate disordered mental states.