Date of Award
Spring 2004
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Recommended Citation
Smith, Michell C., "A case study of events and examples : history in Arundhati Roy's The god of small things" (2004). Honors Theses. 325.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/325
Comments
At the heart of Arundhati Roy's remarkably popular and critically favored novel The God o Small Things is a love story, which begins with a forbidden glance. Ammu, divorced mother of two, outcast daughter of a solidly Anglophilic South Indian bourgeois family, gazes upon the "[c]ontoured and hard," highly "[p]olished" body of Velutha, Paravan carpenter, Untouchable family servant (Roy 167). And Velutha looks back. A small thing, the small thing of the novel's title even, but an occurrence that unravels a family, results in a savage beating, multiple deaths, and a lingering malaise. This novel demands that we ask how such a small thing could come to mean so much, and answering that question, along with unearthing the notion of history that saddles such an occurrence with such heavy symbolic freight, is the goal of this essay.