A Horse And Two Goats Analysis

A Horse and Two Goats was written by R.K. Narayan and published in 1970. The story describes how Indian man and the American man dealt with the cultural clash. During the period that Western ruled Indian, many literatures were written based on the concept of colonial discourse, which is the theory of how European uses their power to construct image to non-Western. Under this concept, Indian is considered as Oriental who is less civilized and less educated. The power of colonizer’s literature and media influence everyone around the world to learn fault knowledge about Indian. Thus, after India’s independent, Narayan had a motivation to writes the story reflecting Indian’s perspective. He applied postcolonial theory to this story to refuses the idea of colonial discourse. Hence, this essay will exemplify binary opposites, analyze the story based on postcolonial concept, and define the main theme, which is cultural clash.

To begin with, this story briefly talks about an Indian old man named “Muni” and his desperate life in the small village called Kritam. Muni coincidentally met an American man who was in need for help. Unfortunately, they both spoke different languages causes misunderstanding throughout whole conversation. In this story, the American man was given power to be

Narayan proves that even if there is no language barrier, European’s nature mind still disparaging non-European due to the power of colonizer. Therefore, this story is the resistance toward the European because it reveals that no matter what Europeans think of themselves, they are not different from non-European. Although Muni is less educated in American man’s point of view, they both still ended up at the same place where no one could understand each other. Narayan implies that Western are not superior to other culture, and no culture would be considered civilized than one