Narrative Technique in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

The God of Small Things was the debut novel of an eminent Man Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy. The novel explores the childhood experience of fraternal twins by adopting the Bildungsroman techniques as narrative pattern. It explores the themes of social discriminations, class relations and cultural tensions, Indian history and politics, forbidden love, betrayal, etc. The novel is rich from the point of Narrative pattern and its techniques. Roy applies traditional, as well as, innovative techniques to build a story which reflects Indian consciousness. It works upon specific uses of phrases, punctuations or exaggerations of description. Roy, in order to narrate the novel, uses literary devices like- de-familiarization, similes & metaphors, repetition of words and phrases, epigrams and paradoxes, irony, oxymoron, metonymy, synecdoche, pun, saying versus showing in her writing, flashback narrative technique. She also uses some sound oriented techniques like- rhythm, alliteration, internal rhyme, assonance, dissonance, etc. The content of Arundhati Roy's writing basically focuses on feminist perceptions, post-colonial dimensions, politics, literary tourism and her Indianness.