Tracing the Abject: A Poststructuralist Study of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

This paper examines Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things from the perspective of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection that she presented in her book Powers of Horror. This study contends that Roy’s novel depicts abject identities such as lower-caste Hindus, abandoned children, and a divorced mother highlighting the power relations and discourses that create social inequalities and marginalize people having non-normative identities. The study uses a poststructuralist approach to unpack the densely-layered text to highlight how Roy paints the fluidity of meaning and identity. As this is qualitative research, Catherine Belsey’s model of textual analysis has been employed to validate the above premises. The research involves a close reading of the text to unfold its profound engagement with the phenomena of identity construction in a rigidly hierarchical and stratified society. This paper reveals that Arundhati Roy foregrounds the dilemmas of abject figures in her fictional world to critique the oppressive social and political structures that she observes in the world she inhabits. Through a portrayal of marginal subjectivities, she deconstructs the dominant cultural discourses and ideologies and presents them as tyrannical and suffocating. Roy’s depiction of the caste and class pyramid in her novel demonstrates that the groups, ethnicities, and communities exiting at the bottom of this pyramid are viewed as objects of disgust and disdain as they threaten the perceived stability of these structures. Ultimately, this research contributes to South Asian studies by introducing a relatively nuanced theoretical paradigm to analyze South Asian fiction.