Negotiating Power: Institutional Discipline and the Paradox of Freedom in Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

This paper is a comparative analysis of the novels Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary institutions. Both works explore how individuals are shaped and defined by the systems of power in social structures. Henry Chinaski from Ham on Rye and Balram Halwai from The White Tiger are two literary examples of how disciplinary mechanisms, such as the family, school, and class hierarchy, function to instill docility and conformity in individuals despite differences in culture, geography, and time. The paper examines how both protagonists attempt to resist these institutional forces in their quest for autonomy and identity, and how, in attempting to do so, they become further entangled in the same structures they previously challenged. Through a Foucauldian lens, this paper highlights, with reference to the select novels, that the formation of individuality is not as separable from the disciplinary practices that limit and control it and that freedom emerges not outside power but within its functions. Ultimately, the paper unravels how both Bukowski and Adiga shed light on the paradox of subjectivity, where resistance and submission coexist, and liberation remains inseparable from the structures of power that control it.