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Theme Of Narrative In The Glass Palace

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The use of the device of the narrator and the narrating stance is termed by Genette as narrative voice. A narrative cannot influence the reader consciously or unconsciously if there is not the fascination of story and story- telling. According to Kenon there are three basic aspects of narrative fiction: story, text and narration. Todorov holds that each different way the fabula is told presents a different sjuzet. Thus it becomes clear that the act of narrating is important rather than the story. There has been extensive experimentation done in this aspect of narrative voice and the novel has witnessed a lot of significant structural changes. Narrative, the element of the story was intact in the …show more content…

It contains tremendous research the writer must have done for this work which makes him write about Burmese life with greater authority. He is very much precise about the depiction of details which makes the prose highly captivating. The main character focalizer in the novel is Raj Kumar and his being an orphan kind of identifies him with the poscolonial identity of a writer. In her essay, “The Road from Mandalay: Reflections on Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace Rukmini B. Nair very appropriately comments:
Raj Kumar’s symbolic as well as real orphan-hood implies that he has to invent a family where none exists; … Raj Kumar has in effect to solve the same dilemma that confronts the postcolonial author… he has to make sense of ‘existential’ conrundum that plagues all individual who cross… the well defined lines of ‘national identity’ and family …show more content…

He shows subjugated Burma and the attitude towards India and the Indians is starkly different from the treatment of the Burmese people. Though Raj Kumar, an Indian born, is there at the centre of the novel, but far from being a flawless character. He is the representative of those Indians who amassed wealth and attained power as they benefited through the British colonization. It is a fact that British colonized both India and Burma, but in Burma it were the Burmese who are the oppressed and exploited while the Indians as well as people from other countries were given much chances to flourish. One of such stories is that of Raj Kumar’s story of success. Through memories and stream of consciousness of Raj Kumar and other such characters Ghosh depicts how colonialism is a process where people and values are always compromised. There is another important narrative technique used by Ghosh. It is the manner in which focus shifts between one country and another. All the major characters are distributed by Ghosh over to Burma, Indian and Malaysia and then knitting them together by presenting them as character focalizers. The strand used by him is ‘history’ not ‘love’, used as the motif that irradiates the first section. Through the enormous screen that he creates over the stage of South Asia, he enacts a shadow play with characters that focalize and bring alive the colonial history of

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