Introduction:
Arundhati Roy, the first Indian woman writer to have won the Man Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel The God of Small Things, has chosen to employ language psychologically, typographically, structurally, and culturally in order to create characters and represent the Indian sensibility in all its cultural dimensions. Language is not only employed to mean the spoken or written words but also the way cultural groups understand and communicate to one another through customs and traditions in the novel. Roy has employed the language in such a way throughout the novel that helps the reader better understand complexity of characters, most importantly Estahappen and Rahel, the seven year old twins who are most affected by the …show more content…
The writer of our novel is a native of Kerala therefore it is quite natural for the writer to think in English as well as Malayalam. She leaves all the questions of her language choices, unanswered, of incorporation of Malayalam language in an English text that she has made in her novel in order to evoke Indian sensibility when she is asked in an interview with Taisha Abraham by replying, “All I can say about that is language is the skin on my thought. My language is something that I find hard to analyze and dissect. It’s the way I think. I have no answers to questions about it” (Roy, 1998). By incorporating both the languages beautifully Roy intends to show us how her native tongue, even after coexisting with other languages, hasn’t lost its own …show more content…
This seems to be the most notable stylistic characteristic. Roy here is taking liberties with the language and disregards conventional grammar on lexical formation. Commonly, the strategy that Roy incorporates is that she forms new words by direct merging of two lexical items graphically as if they are legitimately one word-form, such as “babylegs” and“bluegreyblue”. She comes up with the inventive adjectives by hyphenating two items and sometimes with an adjectival suffix, such as “angrycoloured”, “fan-whirring” and
Arundhati Roy, the first Indian woman writer to have won the Man Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel The God of Small Things, has chosen to employ language psychologically, typographically, structurally, and culturally in order to create characters and represent the Indian sensibility in all its cultural dimensions. Language is not only employed to mean the spoken or written words but also the way cultural groups understand and communicate to one another through customs and traditions in the novel. Roy has employed the language in such a way throughout the novel that helps the reader better understand complexity of characters, most importantly Estahappen and Rahel, the seven year old twins who are most affected by the …show more content…
The writer of our novel is a native of Kerala therefore it is quite natural for the writer to think in English as well as Malayalam. She leaves all the questions of her language choices, unanswered, of incorporation of Malayalam language in an English text that she has made in her novel in order to evoke Indian sensibility when she is asked in an interview with Taisha Abraham by replying, “All I can say about that is language is the skin on my thought. My language is something that I find hard to analyze and dissect. It’s the way I think. I have no answers to questions about it” (Roy, 1998). By incorporating both the languages beautifully Roy intends to show us how her native tongue, even after coexisting with other languages, hasn’t lost its own …show more content…
This seems to be the most notable stylistic characteristic. Roy here is taking liberties with the language and disregards conventional grammar on lexical formation. Commonly, the strategy that Roy incorporates is that she forms new words by direct merging of two lexical items graphically as if they are legitimately one word-form, such as “babylegs” and“bluegreyblue”. She comes up with the inventive adjectives by hyphenating two items and sometimes with an adjectival suffix, such as “angrycoloured”, “fan-whirring” and