The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy's 1996 novel The God of Small Things is an acclaimed critical work. The story, which is not told chronologically, revolves around fraternal twins Rahel and Estha and their mother...

To understand Arundhati Roy’s novel of India, The God of Small Things, one needs some appreciation of the ancient culture that continues to define that country. India’s is a caste system;...

Religion plays an important, if tangential, role in the novel The God of Small Things. There are a great many religious undertones and references, and there are prominent actions that are caused by...

Social realism can be defined as works that present racial and social injustice and economic deprivation through a presentation of characters who are facing such issues. By so doing, social realism...

The God of Small Things is very much a novel about what it means to be colonized. Specifically, Arundhati Roy looks at how individual Indian characters respond to the fallout of India's having been...

The novel The God of Small Things is author Arundhati Roy's most well-known work, published in 1997. The story is centered on a Syrian family living in southern India from the 1960s to the 1990s....

It would be worth your while to re-read Chapter 11 of this incredible novel, entitled "The God of Small Things." One of the key aspects of Roy's style that is employed throughout the book is the...

It is an interesting question to consider how much a work of fiction reflects the life and concerns of its author. When we examine this excellent novel in this light, we are able to detect some...

The depiction of social, political, and class struggle in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things shows readers how levels of discrimination overlap with people’s race, class, and gender. In...

This passage talks about Ammu dreaming of a one-armed man who can only do one thing at a time; she half-wakes from her dream and can sense her children there, trying to decide whether they should...

This is clearly a big topic with lots of aspects to it. There are plenty of examples of suffering in the novel, and you might want to think about how suffering is experienced by the following pairs...

You have identified an incredibly important aspect of the way in which this unforgettable novel is written. What is distinct about the narrative style of Roy in this book is that she abandons a...

This novel is certainly not lacking in literary features. Roy shows herself to use an absolute plethora to describe and paint the picture of what she wants to convey to her readers. I will pick...

Roy's representation of love in all of its forms contributes to the meaning of the novel by showing how love is fundamentally intertwined with social norms that have existed time out of mind. In...

One of the key aspects of this novel is its narrative structure and the way that Roy presents the reader with two characters who are tortured by an event in the past, and their complicity in that...

Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things does indeed explore many different types of love, and these do contribute greatly to the overall meaning of the novel. Let's do some brainstorming...

In many ways you answered the first question with the second. The last scene between Ammu and Velutha is quite poignant and quite graphic. Roy spares no detail in describing the physical love...

A double standard is when a rule, law, principle, way of thinking, or so on is not applied the same way to different groups. A common double standard occurs with gender. Think about how women are...

Since caste and class are related in the novel, I will answer both together. The novel concerns a couple, Ammu and Velutha, who break the Love Laws--a touchable Ammu (upper class/higher caste)...

I don't know if the copy I have of this novel corresponds to yours in terms of page numbers. I recommend that you visit the pages suggested by your teacher in the question to double-check which...

Yes, very much so. Set in Kerala, India, the novel shows the devastation that occurs within a family as a result of the love affair between the twins' mother (Ammu) and an Untouchable (Velutha)....

To find evidence that Rahel faces discrimination due to her gender, check out chapter one and the section that summarizes Rahel’s life in school and beyond. In school, Rahel is constantly in...

The importance of the illimba tree in this book is that it marks the place and also the moment when Sophie Mol drowns and dies. It is when Sophie Mol leads her Indian cousins, Estha and Rahel, on...

The most important relationship that Roy suggests between the caste system and the ideals of the communist party is that both are equally hypocritical and corrupting. The story is set in the Indian...

The elements you have highlighted are inextricably intertwined with the themes of the novel. Note how one of the central plot elements, the affair between Ammu and Velutha, breaks so many taboos....

It didn't matter that the story had begun, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The God of Small Things is a 1997 Booker...

I would say that Roy places a great deal of weight on how the social stratification of a nation can impact its people. The divisions caused by race, class, and religion are ones that occupy...

It seems to me that the most overwhelming aspect of the cruelty at the hands of the class segregation system lies in the reality that individual action is motivated by its adherence over all else....

This is a tough question because of the intricate nature of Roy's work. She provides no easy answers. In my mind, I think that if there is one source of evil or a location for it, the class...

This is a fairly sensitive issue and will not have a reductive and easy answer. There are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed here. Some of them are in the context of Roy's novel...

Diasporic literature is a genre characterized by the gulf between a homeland and an adopted country. In these works, characters often face the isolation of belonging neither to the cultures they...