Sonali Deraniyagala Wave Analysis

Sonali Deraniyagala, in her novel Wave, stated, “All these waves now, charging, churning. Suddenly furious. Suddenly menacing” (Deraniyagala 5). She and her family were experiencing a destructive tsunami. This novel displays Sonali’s life after the tsunami. There are a plethora of differences among the other novels and the novel Wave; it is a memoir, a story of grief, and a story of natural disaster. Unlike the other novels read in class, Wave is a memoir. This is important because the reader can sympathize and understand more of what the author is experiencing. The reader feels as though s/he is seeing and experiencing right along with Sonali. For example, the quotation, “All at once, I saw brown water. No more smoky gray, but billowing brown water, way into …show more content…
They talked numbers. A hundred thousand dead, two hundred thousand, a quarter of a million” (Deraniyagala 38). She had not even ever heard of a tsunami until it destroyed many parts of Sri Lanka. The tsunami killed a plethora of people and destroyed numerous buildings and plants, too, which is demonstrated in the quotation, “But I saw then the poppled trees everywhere, I could make those out, trees on the ground with their roots sticking up” (Deraniyagala 13). The tsunami was powerful enough to kill that many people and collapse tall, sturdy trees. Through the novel Wave, the reader gets a different perspective of South Asia because it is a memoir, a display of grief, and a natural disaster. From the novel being a memoir, the reader feels more attached to Sonali, and can picture everything that is described in the novel, even her grief. She is suicidal even, and wants to see her family again. The tsunami is the whole reason she wrote this book because if it did not happen, she would still have her family. The tsunami killed many people and destroyed many buildings. Waves and water that had once seemed gentile became destructive and