Narrative Technique In Anita Desai's Selected Novels

Registration ID: IJNRD_214353

Published ID: IJNRD2402310

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Dr Suporna Mitra

Form, style, symbolism, fictional technique

Abstract: Anita Desai has established herself as a novelist- as a psychological novelist, as a woman novelist, as a novelist of Indian Diaspora but she is also historically a major novelist. When she made her novelistic debut with her first novel Cry, The Peacock her thematic choices, technique and style, form and language represented a major shift. Much of the critical writings on Anita Desai centre around her preoccupation with urban sensibility and a style of what she herself called ‘the language of interior.’ The shift in sensibility from writer like R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao and, for that matter Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to Anita Desai are indicative of the socio-cultural changes India underwent from the forties to the sixties and the seventies. While the major pre-occupation of R. Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Kamala Markandaya is sociological in terms of hunger, poverty, superstition and dogma, the new generation of Indian English novelists with Anita Desai are basically concerned with deep cultural and psychological problems that inevitably emerge in a transitional society. In his selection of women writers. R. Shrinivas Iyengar included a critique of Desai’s fiction and stated that her first two novels, Cry, The Peacock and Voices in the City have “added a new dimension to the achievement of the Indian women writers in India.” This dimension takes multiple forms and is true of both Anita Desai’s early and later novels with some thematic changes especially in the later novels. In Anita Desai’s novels there is a shift from the collective to the personal, from the communal to the individual. Unlike Jhabvala’s novels where the social dimensions are more important than the characters, and Markandeya’s novels where the stress is on the economic and social background. Desai’s novels highlight individual characters their inner worlds and sensibilities. Her first two novels namely Cry, The Peacock and Voices in the City are said to have ushered in the psychological novel in Indian English fiction. Desai’s heroines represent the “creative release of feminine sensibility “which emerge after World War II. Her women characters are not ordinary, mainstream women but are mostly from affluent families and do not have to worry about daily subsistence. They are more concerned with their emotional needs. Desai explores the inner world of her heroines and reveals the deeper forces at work in creating the feminine sensibility. Since Anita Desai’s emphasis is on the inner world of her characters rather than the outer world of action, she uses the stream of consciousness technique to delineate her characters. The subtle nuances of the emotional world of her characters are reflected in syntax and imagery. Form, structure, style and language in Anita Desai’s novels undergo gradual advancement and development with the passage of time in novel. In this paper an attempt has been made to understand the form and style and their application in her selected novels in the chronological order. Simplistically speaking, techniques include everything that a novelist uses for narrating a story. On finer level it means imagery, symbolism, point of view, chronological order of events, stream of consciousness, schematisation of chapter division or some other basis of division of the novel, etc. Dialogue, language, characterization and plot are some other aspects of fictional technique.

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Dr Suporna Mitra (February-2024). Narrative Technique In Anita Desai's Selected Novels. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NOVEL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 9(2), d110-d114. https://ijnrd.org/papers/IJNRD2402310.pdf

Volume 9 Issue 2, February-2024

Pages : d110-d114

Paper Reg. ID: IJNRD_214353

Published Paper Id: IJNRD2402310

Downloads: 000122254

Research Area: Arts

Author Type: Indian Author

Country: Pune, Maharashtra, India

Published Paper PDF: https://ijnrd.org/papers/IJNRD2402310.pdf

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