SYNTAX & ANALYSIS
PASSAGE #1 “The reason for this sudden, unceremonious dumping was a new love. Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’etat—they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. And so, while her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby Kochamma followed American NBA league games, one-day cricket and all the Grand Slam tennis tournaments” (27-28).
ANALYSIS
Arundhati Roy’s juxtaposition of a decaying garden and Baby Kochamma’s television symbolizes the way human culture competes with nature. As “her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby Kochamma followed NBA league games” and other sports, soap operas, wars, and more. Roy contrasted the two times to highlight how the cultured garden was replaced with another system of culture, a source of entertainment that needed no tending. The negative connotations behind the words, “wilted and died” reveal the degeneration of the human culture that once defined the garden. Now, as the environment gradually rebalanced the exotic ecosystem Baby had planted, her cultural touch slowly faded. This can be further exemplified by the way communist patcha had “reached through the nostrils of the pink plaster gnomes and blossomed in their hollow heads”. The comparison of nature’s and man’s culture, or the ornamental gardening of the 1960’s and the satellite TV of the 1990’s may serve the purpose of showing how at a conceptual level, these two artificial environments have some parity. The rise and fall of man-made structures is Roy’s subtle way of equating human culture to nature because of their competitive battle to overcome one another. However, in the case of Baby, concentrating her energy in television programs has produced a mixture of the two elements, as Roy presented them in a harmonious co-existence.
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PASSAGE #2 "It wasn’t what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No tress grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circle it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish, perhaps it would only have been Not to Know. Not to know what each day held in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend. And Ammu knew. Or thought she knew, which was really just as bad (because if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, it means you’ve eaten fish). And what Ammu knew (or thought she knew) smelled of vapid, vinegary fumes that rose from the cement vats of Paradise Pickles. Fumes that wrinkled youth and pickled futures.
Hooded in her own hair, Ammu leaned against herself in the bathroom mirror and tried to weep. For herself. For the God of Small things. For the sugar-dusted twin midwives of her dream." (107) ANALYSIS Ammu has always had a problem with planning for the future and this passage serves to emphasize the character's hesitation in looking ahead. Arundhati Roy chooses to write in telegraphic sentences in order to represent the despair that Ammu felt when confronted with facing the idea of the future. Roy's writing style throughout the novel is predominantly filled with an excessive use of adjectives, bombarding the reader with various forms of imagery (usually visual). However, this passage contains far less descriptive words than the author usually implements, suggesting that there is a reason for the shortage. The blunt and choppy sentences such as, "She dreaded it too much", convey the lack of happiness felt by Ammu the moment the idea of a future came into thought. Concise phrases also express a sense of loss of power, as if Roy wanted it to seem like Ammu couldn't control any aspect of her future, knowing that no matter what the indistinguishable road would reveal, "her clear view of the end" did not change over time.
The diction used dramatically alters the tone of the passage when compared to the rest of the novel as well. The repetitive use of the word "No" and its placement in the beginning of several sentences not only emphasizes the somber tone, but adds on to the negativity of Ammu. Beginning with the word "no" already generates a feeling of despair because Roy carefully chose to depict Ammu as the type of person who will always see a glass half empty. |