The Themes, motif, and symbols of The Inheritance of loss

Name        :                 Jumani pooja k

Roll   no     :                          07                

Sem           :                      2

Part           :                       1

Paper No:              E-C- 202: Indian Writing In English

Topic         :              Theme, Motifs, and symbols of Inheritance of loss 

Year          :                2011-12                   

                                                      

                                                                       Submitted by

                                                                       Dr Dilip barad

                                                                       Department of English

                                                                      Bhavnagar University

                                                                      

                      

The Themes, motif, and symbols of

   The Inheritance of loss                       

      

The inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author kiran Desai. It first published in 2006. It won a number of awards including the man Booker prize for the year and the national book critic circle fiction award in 2007.

Among its main theme are migration, living between two worlds and between pass and present.

The story is central two characters Biju and sai, Biju is an illegal Indian immigrant living in the United States. Sai is a living in Darjeeling Desai switehes the narration between both point of view.

The whole novel follow the journey of two characters Biju an sai and Biju an illegal immigrant in the as who is trying to make new life and other sai she is living with her grandfather in India. The novel shows the internal conflict in India its between Muslim groups, and Buddhist groups. It also shows a conflict between past and present. The novel excreted that many Indian were considered to be becoming too english and having forgotten the traditional ways of Indian life shows though the characters ways of Indian life shows though the characters of grandfather. The judge.

         Theme

The novel explores the troubling influence human being on one through the language of inheritance. At times this inheritance is purely physical. The body can without the past, when Sophie discovers that her unusual face echoes unseen face of her mother’s rapist. Even we can say that the word inheritance can take the form of physical tendencies of disintegration or weakness, as when Sophie compares her grandmother’s deformable back to her mother’s mastectomy. Though inheritance spans treaty and attitudes and phial characteristics. That effect is always manifested on the body that example comes in novel’s climax, section there which centers on Sophie’s return to dame Marie to confront the psychological burdens she has inherited from Martine and Sophie feel like ashamed of her body because she feel and feel no desire and hates her fatness how become bulimic, and is only able to have sex while doubling to district herself. The novel expressed that the difficulties provoked by testing suggests the range of ways in which inheritance can happen that not matter of genes or birth but it also reaction to environment, experience and trauma over the course of her development as a human being.

Myth and parable as Mediators of pain and violence.

The novel’s characters use the symbolic language of myth and parable to mediate the horrific violence of history and of the physical world. The most immediate example is provide  by the Mascots, secret police who are widely referred to by the Creole word for ‘bogeyman’s agents of terror and irrational violence the Mascots presence and action cannot be reconciled with the rational world.

On a more local level, stories are used between characters when straightforward conversation becomes too painful. For example Sophie is very suffered of in her life. The women discuss testing in increasingly personal terms. But when she attempts to explain that testing was the worst experience of her life as a result of which she hates her body and cannot be with her husband, Grandma life retreated to her story, replaying that it Alice has passed her examination.

The inheritance of loss by kiran desai is a complex novel which weaves themes of clss,family and experience of living as an outsider into a beautiful narrative. The novel is neas the Darjling but story is very powerful even each and every characters are more straggle in their life and find the identitys and Biju is loss his real identity and tradition.

The poignancy of Biju sense of being alone in NY but realizing that he also does not really fit in at home is powerful. He disparately misses his father but also recognizes that his emigration, this fulfillment of his father’s dream for him, has created a distance between them emotionally that will likely never be bridged. That loss is palpable.

The novel may appear to be taking on big theme colonialism and legacy, love and details of life. Over and over again its characters identity or of cultural contradiction, through what that reminds characters so often of their stomachs.

        Motifs

The connection between language, affiliation and Belonging.

                         From Marine’s first exhortation to the newly arrived Sophie  to learn english lest she be mercilessly teased Sophie’s  english becomes a metaphor for her negotiation of the new world. Lost at first in the sea of unknown words, sophie gains a foothold by finding French words that are semantically the same but pronounced differently.

Parallelism and Doubling

The novel’s emphasis on parallelism and doubling is reflected in its continual juxtaposition of characters, situations, narrative accounts, bodies and time. The pain passed on from mothers and daughters, like that of testing, are often a matter of unconscious repetition, hurt inflicted by mothers who had been hurt themselves. Sophie’s sexual phobia and anxiety echoes Martine’s own, even as both are set against Brigitte’s untroubled sleep. Likewise, reconciliation become a matter of ran acting the past, of consciously altering its course by playing out familiar actions with a new understanding of their consequences.

Finally, the novel’s emphasis on parables informs its sense of meaningful abstraction, the suggestion that local event are incarnation of a broader truth.

Place as a Mediator of memory

The novel’s vontinual emphasis on flight movement, imprisonment and return attests to the powerful role of place and mediator of memory. For artiness, a return to Haiti represents a return to the scene of her rape, and experience so psychologically painful that she becomes physically ill. After she parallels and her psychological exile from life’s happiness and its rewords she very suffered in her life.

           Symbols 

  The marassa

    The marassa are mythical lovers who are so close as a share the samesoul.They are first mentioned by Martine, trying to  distract Sophie as she tests her for the first time Martine is jealous and angry with Sophie’s rebellion for a man instead of acknowledging that she is her mother’s marassa. Throughout the novel, the idea of the marassa, helps symbolize narrative doubles, lovers, and parole and opposite characters.