Narrative Style Arundhati Roy

HUL881 : ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE ART

The God Of Small Things

Exploring Arundhati Roy’s Narrative Style

Shishir Kumar Chaudhary 2006CS50222

The term paper deals with the detailed study of Roy’s narrative style with reference to her first and the extremely popular novel- ‘The God Of Small Things’

The identification of The God of Small Things as postcolonial and/or feminist hinges on the psychoanalytical, socio-historical and political concepts or themes chosen to read the novel as a whole, to interpret its characters, their behavior, attitudes and actions, and to attach a certain meaning to its descriptions and narrative comments. This novel as a genre is generously roomy, capable of fitting in anything and everything from the external world and from the subjective world of feelings and thoughts, while using all the narrative techniques possible, including free indirect speech, stream of consciousness, dramatic narrative, lyrical narrative, prose poem, to name a few. As Roy statesRule One for a writer, as far as I'm concerned, is There Are No Rules. And Rule Two (since Rule One was made to be broken) is There Are No Excuses for Bad Art. Painters, writers, singers, actors, dancers, filmmakers, musicians are meant to fly, to push at the frontiers, to worry the edges of the human imagination, to conjure beauty from the most unexpected things, to find magic in places where others never thought to look. If you limit the trajectory of their flight, if you weigh their wings with society's existing notions of morality and responsibility, if you truss them up with preconceived values, you subvert their endeavor. So, Arundhati Roy chose to tell her story in the form of a novel, not an autobiography, or a short story, or an epic poem, or an essay or a journalistic article. The storytelling mode she used is the one we identify as realism. Informing the realism of her novel are not just verifiable facts of history--the Naxalite revolt and Indira Ghandi's State of...