2023 The God of Small Things Term Essay

In her article “Swimming in the River of Life’’, Laura Wright argues that “What is natural, is represented within Roy’s novel, as Eden run amok, a landscape that is lovely and fecund but also dangerous in its transgression of boundaries … Throughout the narrative, the natural world – the plants in the garden, the monsoon rains, and most significantly the river – push against the constructedness of their confinement and creep into ‘civilised spaces’’ (118). With Wright’s ideas in mind, read the extract below carefully and think about how nature is experienced by the children. How does this wild natural world contrast with their small ‘world’ of Ayemenem, governed by its strict rules and order?

Write an essay of 2500-3000 words in which you consider these ideas, and closely read the extract below, paying particular attention to Roy’s use of language. Your close analysis should be informed by an awareness of the larger events that take place on both sides of the river, in Ayemenem and the History House. Please support your response with the discussion of one other relevant extract from the rest of the novel. Please do not plagiarise or utilise AI.

The silence dipped and soared and swooped and looped in figures of eight.
Jeweled dragonflies hovered like shrill children’s voices in the sun.
Finger-colored fingers fought the ferns, moved the stones, cleared the way. There was a sweaty grappling for an edge to hold on to. And a One Two and.

Things can change in a day.

It was a boat. A tiny wooden vallom.
The boat that Estha sat on and Rahel found.
The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day.
So old a boat that it had taken root. Almost.
A grey old boatplant with boatflowers and boatfruit. And underneath, a boat-shaped patch of withered grass. A scurrying, hurrying boat world.
Dark and dry and cool. Unroofed now. And blind. White termites on their way to work.
White ladybirds on their way home.
White beetles burrowing away from the light. White grasshoppers with whitewood violins. Sad white music.
A white wasp. Dead.
A brittlewhite snakeskin, preserved in darkness, crumbled in the sun…
Two-egg twins looked out across their river. The Meenachal.
Greygreen. With fish in it. The sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.
The first third of the river was their friend. Before the Really Deep began. They knew the slippery stone steps (thirteen) before the slimy mud began. They knew the afternoon weed that flowed inwards from the backwaters of Komarakom. They knew the smaller fish. The flat, foolish pallathi, the silver paral, the wily, whiskered koori, the sometimes karimeen.
Here Chacko had taught them to swim (splashing around his ample uncle stomach without help). Here they had discovered for themselves the disconnected delights of underwater farting. Here they had learned to fish. To thread coiling purple earth- worms onto hooks on the fishing rods that Velutha made from slender culms of yellow bamboo.
Here they studied Silence (like the children of the Fisher Peoples), and learned the bright language of dragonflies.

Bibliography:

Wright, Laura. ”Swimming in the River of Life’’, Wilderness in Civilised Shapes:Reading the Postcolonial Environment. University of Georgia Press, 2010, pp.103-127.

Answers to Above Questions on English

Answer: Nature is regarded as one of the powerful forces in Arundhati Roy novel the God of Small Things. The argument made by Laura Wright about nature as both alluring and boundary transgressing is closely associated with the novel exploration of the natural world.