Analysis Of Esha Dey's 'The Serpent And The Rope'

Here is a suggestion of the parallel possibilities for Pai. He says that he crosses the wall for the first time. The wall, of course, is the illusion that stands as barrier to the perception of reality, perhaps necessary so long as man belongs to the world, has family and all. The obstacle to the perception of reality is the ego. Once the illusion (ego) vanishes, you become Govindan Nair who could jump over the wall back and forth endlessly absorbing the ecstasy and letting it fall at any place. Everything resolves happily at the end, abiding to the term ‘a metaphysical comedy’.
Esha Dey develops her arguments on the thread of sequential aspect of the novel. She believes that The Cat and Shakespeare is thematically and formally constituent part of the sequel as started with Kanthapura and further developed into The Serpent and the Rope:
After the confusion and groping in Kanthapura, and the agony of crisis in The Serpent and the Rope, Rao’s quest for form at last arrives at the destination in The Cat and Shakespeare, where Rao comes nearest to a synthesis to embody his metaphysics in a literary form, without that pronounced conflict which upset the structural balance in Kanthapura and rent the fictional fabric of The Serpent and the Rope. (Dey: 144)
The focus of the novel, …show more content…
This type of structure is created with the help of a mixed form – narration and intellectual digression. And the result is a novel which offers a perennial source of humour which is perhaps the characteristic mark of it. It is through the Shakespearean interlude that the readers are prepared to take the whole fictional world whose purpose is tropical, to illustrate an abstract idea of phenomenality, a relative world beyond which lies the Absolute Reality. So the title is not a mere surrealist stunt, but a pointer to the new technique that the novel has adopted in its post-modernist leaning towards the