Relationships And Literary Devices In Narcopolis By Jeet Thayil

The word “opium” is utilized several times in this short story. An opium is an addictive, narcotic drug that relieves pain or brings ecstasy. In a figurative sense, it is a way to avoid reality. For some, alcohol allows for just that. For others, it could be music, sexual intercourse, gambling, and many more. In “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” the thin Mexican says, “Religion is the opium of the poor” (Hemingway 478). But, this statement is not necessarily true, which Mr. Frazer soon realizes. Several opiums, or escapes from reality, exists, as this story shows.

In the speech,”Everything you know about addiction is wrong,” spoken by Johann Hari, attempts to inform the audience about how society takes drug addiction the wrong way and is completely normal for a human to use drugs as a last resort in life. The presentation starts off when he explains to the audience the many different drug addicts he has met in his life a few years ago while traveling a long 30,000 mile journey. He then goes onto stating from his research that everything humanity has been taught about drugs is completely backwards. A experiment was done in the 50’s to show the relationship between drugs and social life. The reason people start drugs is not because they want to, but it is caused by not being able to bear a present in your life. Moreover, there is cruel punishments of drug abuse in America and how Portugal has tried to change it in their country. Luckily people can get over any kind of addiction when they have a friend or blood relative that they can call on if they have a crisis. Finally, people should be more supportive and open in their heart when it comes to others that have a addiction. The author uses logos and pathos to emotionally connect and comfort the people that have thought about drugs in their life and people that dislike drugs and addicts, but using ethos he tries to make a change in the natural drug habitat.

Analyzing a symbol as a literary convention used by author, Junot Díaz makes a way to identify the purpose of the device. In his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the mechanism is used to develop an explicit character and point of view. The symbol is a sensory image that holds rich implication that is either a narrow or broad. Occasionally the reader is cast off by the author with an unknown meaning of the symbol hence is forced to create his own interpretation. The latter principle is intentionally carried out by the author as a literary hook to draw the attention of his audience to keep reading. Moreover, the author may also use in combination with the hook the method of utilizing pathos as a way of arousing the

When Benjamin leaves the hotel and the drug starts taking effect, “The feeling of loneliness is very quickly lost” (Benjamin 371). Soon, feelings of “ wonderful, beatific humor”, “canonical magic” and “benevolence” (371) take over. This positive diction reinforces the unique and enjoyable experience that the author is undergoing, ultimately serving as a transition from his feeling of loneliness. Consistently, the author continuously uses positive diction, appealing to the reader’s emotions. The words “ecstasy” (373), and “rhythmic bliss” (373), also serve to illustrate the positive difference in his mood from being sober to intoxicated.

Benjamin Zephaniah describes London as a place of many possibilities. There is a mixture of different cultures, people, and things, that anyone can find themselves in London. In his poem, he deals not only with positive features but also with the negative ones. He is writing about drugs, weapons, … Although these are things that normal people would decry, Zephaniah sees the beauty right in such subjects. However, the poem might seem rather seamy, at the end of the poem, the reader feels the potentialities of the city. In conclusion, in Zephaniah’s view, London is a place for

Najwa el-Dewani is a woman who lacks self-confidence. Having been married off at the youthful age of fourteen and having a child shortly after, she was thrust into the world of adulthood before she could finish her own childhood. Najwa’s husband is often away for extended periods of time, which also puts in a lonely mental state. She pleads for her husband to give up his political rebellion but, he refuses, returning with the traumatizing scars of his battle. For this reason, Najwa self-medicates with alcohol and cigarettes to fill in the space left by her rebel husband. Her alcohol binges cause her to expose the atrocities of her life to her nine-year-old son, further intensifying their family troubles. Her son only knew of her addiction as an “illness” that could only be cured by his Baba’s presence. The jump from childhood, to womanhood to motherhood has left Najwa with non-existent self-confidence and coupled with the loneliness of a wife without her husband has put Najwa into a spiralling addiction.

Narcopolis and Zohra are novels that are set against the backdrop of two large metropolis of India – Mumbai and Hyderabad. Through the characters in the two novels, the novelists not just narrate the stories of two distinct sets of people in these cities, but also portray the sub-cultures where they live and die. As such, the characterization of the various persons in the novels is an elemental and indispensable way to understand the sub-cultures the novels portray, especially to the reader unfamiliar with these sub cultures. The characters in Nacropolis are those from the world of addicts, prostitutes, pimps and drug dealers, whose conversations and interpersonal relations bring out the various travails of their lives, their near-hopeless futures and unfulfilled desires, a world where drugs play as important role as characters themselves. In Zohra, similarly, the chasm between the ambitions and

Agunpakhi, published in April 2008 is the first full fledged novel written by Hassan Ajizul Haque. He was born in1939 in West Bengal and just after the completion of his school studies, his family had to leave India for East Bengal to avoid any insidious after-effect of the partition. Atin Bandyapadhaya and Sunanda Sikdar both left East Bengal for West Bengal but Ajizul Haque was one, who left West Bengal for East Bengal. Ordinarily, the critics tend to take it as altogether a feminist novel, but an in-depth study may bring out the truth that it is a tale of ‘metamorphosis’ or a total transformation of a human self into a metaphorical phoenix, born out of the fire of riot. It’s a tale of a woman, who struggles within and ultimately is purified. She becomes bold and decisive to denounce the so called geographical concepts of boundaries which break the human hearts and yield unimaginable destitution and suffering. It raises some basic questions of humanism and shows ways to ‘bimukti’ (liberation) of the human soul from all conflicts and ignorance. Agunpakhi is no simple woman, but a part of a greater human civilization where each individual is given importance according to his or her own choice. Accordingly, there are no direct actions of violence shown in the text because violence, as its own, has no power at all. The Indian concept of humanism believes in non-violence which is the best way to

This paper titled, “DEETI - the metaphor in Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies”, focuses on how the author, Amitav Ghosh, uses the character Deeti as a metaphor. Amitav Ghosh is a Serious historical and Fictional writer born in Calcutta in a Bengali family. His Father, Shailendra Chandra Ghosh a Military officer. Wife Deborah Baker, The author of Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. Ghosh became a faculty at Queens College, New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative literature, also became a visiting professor at Harvard University. He came back to India, later he published the Ibis Trilogy. Sea of Poppies(2008), River of Smoke(2011), and Flood of Fire (2015). He was awarded the Padma Shri by The Indian Government and Elected as the Royal Society of Literature in 2009 and named a ford foundation Art of Challenge Fellow in 2015. In many

Divided in four parts – “The Year of Our Loves and Friendships”, “The Year of Her Passion”, “The Years of Betrayal”, and “Homecoming- The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a bold attempt at telling the epic of Asian people in Africa. It is a novel concerning themes of love, passion, commitment and more importantly, identity. The narrator, Vikram Lall, is a Kenyan born Indian who grows up in an era where rebellion, confusion, and disruption were all prevalent. In this journal, you will learn about the characters, themes, and settings in the first half of this book.

Rushdie has explored many themes and issues in his writing cosmos within the postcolonial perspective in relationship with language, history, politics, identity, migration, and globalization. The present paper is focused on his two famous novels The Moor's Last Sigh and Shalimar the Clown that had taken a reversion from the other works that are based on western countries and characters. He is traversing back from routes to roots, envisioning the Indian subcontinent within his critiques. Rushdie encompasses through the geographical, political, and cultural limits in the course of his written works, just to come back to explore his subcontinent. In both these books the Indian nation expects a key topical core interest with a major focus on serious issues like historical backdrop of India loaded with turbulence in the present circumstances, and the issue of Kashmir has given a priority that has got mutilated between India and Pakistan since independence. The experience of distance inside the third world connection is pondered upon after the postcolonial era of the subcontinent. Rushdie investigates the historical backdrop of India full with turbulence in the most recent century in The Moor’s Last Sigh, while it is the issue of Kashmir that expects priority in Shalimar the Clown.

The Title of this text, Midnight’s Children, gives the reader a broad idea of what the text is about: It gives the time and where the setting may play off. This text dominates the theme of identity that breaks down colonial constructs of Western dominance over Eastern culture, hence Salman Rushdie position as a prominent Anglo-Indian postcolonial writer. In this paragraph of Midnight’s Children, we are able to see the psychological effects of colonial domination.

The proposed project will discuss on the novel “Untouchable” by Mulk Raj Anand and will draw attention towards the sensitive issue of untouchability. ‘Untouchable’ a fiction published in the year 1935, presents the prime concerns of the great author Mulk Raj Anand, which is, to highlight the cause of the dumb and the deserted, the lowly and the lost of an adverse society. His concerns are always been for the creatures in the lower depths of Indian society who are the rejected, who had no way to articulate their anguish against the oppressors. Hence, the title of the project “Deplorable Description of the Outcaste” is apt.

The novel follows the life of a young boy growing up in Calcutta and later on in Delhi and London. The novel has various themes such as nationalism, freedom, violence. Memory and conflict between ‘illusion’ and ‘reality’. Illusion means false notion and reality means truth. In the novel The Shadow Lines, ‘shadow’ stands for illusion’ and ‘lines’ stand for reality. This theme is represented through various characters of the novel.

Mulk Raj Anand, despite a genius writer, is a critic, an educationist and a social worker. He is interested in human beings despite his critics described him a Marxist, a propagandist. His fiction revolves around the human being. Humanitarian ground becomes the nucleus of all his thinking and writing. He does not believe in ‘art for art’s sake’ but he believes in ‘art for the sake of man’. His main attempt in his work has been to expose the values of a man in a society by which he may gain real foundations for moral behavior and realize a just social order. His novels divulge a realistic sensibility which is capable to measure the depth of human personality and social structure. His commitment to his humanistic dogma and obsession with the downtrodden could be well explained inter alia his fictional experimentation. This paper presents a teenage boy who is the role model of all teenage coolies who suffer by the capitalism of the society.