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- Title
Transcendence of Boundaries and the Operation of Power Structures in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.
- Authors
S., Rakhi Krishna
- Abstract
The Booker Prize winning The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is a highly political novel that revolves around the lives of the fraternal twins Estha and Rahel. A strain of pessimism touches throughout the strands of the non-linear narration of the novel. The novel discusses issues of sex, caste, religion etc. in the most obvious manner. It lays bare the double standards of the society, and the overt gap between preaching and practice. The God of Small Things questions how certain people are relegated to the margins, and how crossing the prescribed limits take a heavy toll on their lives. The people in authority, be it the institutions of law, religion or education have formulated different laws for different people. The indifference Ammu faces is mainly because of the fact that she is a woman, who is "unworthy" of being educated. Similarly, Velutha's relationship with Ammu was at the cost of his life. The paper seeks to demarcate the establishments of power the novel discusses and how in close association are these establishments with the boundaries or the limits they dictate. The boundaries make a clear distinction of who the powerful are and who aren't, since only the former have the capability to prescribe who should stand where.
- Subjects
GOD of Small Things, The (Book); ROY, Arundhati, 1946-; POWER (Social sciences) in literature; NARRATION; INTERPERSONAL relations in literature
- Publication
Language in India, 2019, Vol 19, Issue 4, p300
- ISSN
1930-2940
- Publication type
Literary Criticism