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The Crooked Line Essay

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Ismat Chughtai’s The Crooked Line reads like a classic Bildungsroman in many ways. It is the story of a child born in an environment which is fairly hostile who grows up and is able to move away from this hostile environment on a journey of self discovery. This basic structure is, however, where the similarity ends. A Bildungsroman is a novel of development of the central protagonist from birth to a position of stability within the social sphere. This normative form functions as a basis for Ismat Chughtai’s novel The Crooked Line but instead of being the pattern followed, it is the path not taken. The normative Bildungsroman is that against which this novel rebels and tells the story of a protagonist who follows a trajectory which is individualistic …show more content…

As it avows to depict reality and change is a fundamental feature of reality, it is imperative that the realist novel changes constantly as well. This implies that the structural foundation of a Bildungsroman would also have to be modified in order to make it contemporary and also realist. The nature of this change, especially in the European context is obvious in terms of the transformation of the novel from depicting stability into a genre which hinges on the inherent instability of a society. In his essay on this topic, Franco Moretti in his introduction to The Way of the World argues that the new novel is the transformative novel. In this, he uses the model of the novel of adultery in which the growth of a character is located in the sphere of adultery and thereby is essentially an unstable stability. This instability forms the foundation of the novel form in one more significant aspect; one which is critical for Chughtai’s Shaman as well. Youth is important for the central protagonist because it is the site of potential which is hitherto untapped. This potential encapsulates the heroic potential of the protagonist and manifests itself in the larger system of causality in the text. The trajectory which the central protagonist will choose to follow is begun in a young age. The decisions of the character work as milestones against which one may measure the success or the degree of closure provided by the ending. However, as Moretti further elaborates, this Bildungsroman encapsulates within it another paradox; the individual’s growth cannot be parallel to societal growth as the social sphere exists in order to suppress the individual. This implies that any authentic Bildungsroman hinges on the discovery of a stable and viable alternative. That the protagonist will in some way find a balance between the self and the world and therefore s/he will be able to develop personally as well as socially. This developmental

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