Jason-Roy-4/4

            To me that the focus on recurring images and/or objects in both The God Of Small Things and Midnight’s Children holds a similarity somewhere. It may even be present in A Bend In The River in the fact that Salim is a dealer of things. Though comparatively, Roy’s and Rushdie’s usage of the idea seems to be a much clearer parallel.

Throughout Roy’s novel the narrator picks out particular objects, types of reactions or impressions to things and events, onomatopoeic descriptions, animals, and other points of focus that is in a way similar to Rushdie’s usage of recurrent images and objects. In Rushdie’s case, through Saleem, he (Rushdie) takes these continually surfacing things and uses them as the literal (as in the words he uses on the page) and metaphoric material for building the story that Saleem’s history consists of.

So, it seems to me that in the case of Midnight’s Children things/objects/images, in other words, the fragments of memory, are the basis for weaving a narrative. It seems also that within these things there is a meaning within them being discovered, maybe re-discovered, or at the least being applied to them by an imaginative individual. On page 121, Rushdie shows Saleem describing a list of things that he (Saleem) says made him.

            In Roy’s novel, I think a similar thing is happening though in a different way. On page 215:

           

At the time, there would only be incoherence. As though meaning had slunk out of things and left them fragmented. Disconnected. The glint of Ammu’s needle. The color of a ribbon. The weave of the cross-stitch counterpane. A door slowly breaking. Isolated things that didn’t mean anything. As though the intelligence that decodes life’s hidden patterns – that connects reflections to images, glints to light, weaves to fabric, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to anger to remorse – was suddenly lost.

In this passage it shows a struggle to link things together to build an understanding of a moment, a family, and an individual life or a memory of a life. This passage comes after a description of Chacko’s grief after Sophie Mol’s funeral and Ammu asking Rahel and Estha to always love each other. What seems to be an inability to connect things together to make meaning out of them could relate to the structure of the narrative, how it frequently interrupts itself and the flow of time.

Though the opposite could just as well be said that the intercutting structure could be a sign of consciously splicing things/objects/images/ideas together to make meaning – though in Roy’s novel there doesn’t seem to be a self-aware narrator. Either way, this kind of style, of piecing together fragments (or the inability to do so) could be a defining characteristic of South Asian Literature.