One technique used in Roy that is similar to Rushdie is the use of prophetic dream. In Midnight's Children on page 238, Saleem has a fever dream that begins "No colors except green and black the walls are green the sky is black . . . . " The dream continues: "the children run and scream the Widow's hand curls round them green and black." The dream, though dreamt by Saleem in the present after drinking Padma's love elixir, comes at a point in the novel when Saleem is nearly-nine.
On page 205 in The God of Small Things, while Estha and Rahel visit Velutha and Kuttappen, Ammu dreams: "Ammu traveled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her close by the light of an oil lamp." She dreams of Velutha, but Ammu and Velutha can't touch because "in the shadows, there were metal folding chairs arranged in a ring and on the chairs there were people, with slanting rhinestone sunglasses, watching." Roy even uses the same color combination that Rushdie used: "The sea was black, the spume vomit-green."
The dreams come at points in the narrative when the reader knows that things are going to go very badly but not why and act as a preview. Both dreams depict people at the mercy of forces much larger than them. With Rushdie it is the Widow (Indira Gandhi) who represents the government and history, and in Roy it is the people in sunglasses who represent society, or opinion, or what-would-the-neighbors-think. For Roy even the most intimate moments, like dreams, are invaded by oppressive societal forces. On a side note, this is the second time in the novel that Velutha's abs have been described as the ridges of a chocolate bar. Whose description is that? Would a grown woman describe abs that way?
No comments:
Post a Comment