Chapter 8 - Enigmatic Variations, Language Games, and the Arrested Bildungsroman

Summary

In Chapter 8, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things dramatizes the tragedy of Ammu, Rahel, and Estha. The children experience profound guilt for their part in the deaths of their cousin Sophie Mol and of Velutha, the god of small things of the title. The deaths are focalized through their eyes and told across two time frames, which serves to give us progressive, if fragmentary, instalments of the collapse of the children’s own internal emotional landscapes. I argue that even though the distribution of the story across two time frames suggests the shape of a fractured bildungsroman, the traumatic events of their childhood so firmly seal them into the discourse of tragedy, that theirs becomes not the story of growing up but rather the teleology of an arrested development. I trace the various ways in which the crises in the social world are metonymically displaced onto that of volatile nature.