Catharsis In 'The Color Of Nothingness'

Catharsis is a psychological way of getting someone’s true beliefs or thoughts out of their mind. Authors use catharsis as a tool to express their emotions toward the society in which they live in, and how the people in the society act and express their culture. In South Asian literature, authors use catharsis to provide readers with the viewpoints of people in societies that face challenges like technology and emotions but come to a point in life where it becomes necessary to let go of something to move on.

In the story “The Color of Nothingness,” the narrator falls in love with a girl named Nustrat. Nustrat later becomes hurt, and at the end of the story dies. The last line of the story, “I shut the door and was never able to open …show more content…
The image of the oxen and the theme of the story combine into the cathartic moment of which the author sees of their society. The narrator of the story always looked for the wagon, to see inside it, but he never knew where his obsession with the wagon would take him. I think the author tries to explain about societies where many things remain a mystery, and with contradicting viewpoints, how people cannot obsess too much over something. If people become obsessive, then they become depressed when they fail to receive the answer they want, which happened to the …show more content…
In addition, I saw another underlying theme I think the author tries to hide. The region of South Asia is constantly at war and never in stable condition. When looking at the story through a similar lens, I think the wagon represented technology. Not just technology itself, but instead the fear of technology taking over the cultures which never depended on it. The fear that technology in South Asia will lead to nuclear disaster, because all it just takes a small city or village to become pent up with rage and change to start a nuclear war. Then not only will the people from South Asia smell the stench of nuclear warfare and feel the side effects, but the whole world will. The fear which people possess drives them, like the narrator in the story, to find an answer which satisfies the person looking for one. The author uses catharsis to help people understand the concept of: if they let go of the thing they look for or let go of the fear they hold, then their life will not consist of mystery and