The Thousand Faces Of Night Analysis

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Then she philosophically concludes the story by generalizing the fact that, “a woman gets her heart’s desire by great cunning” (Hariharan, TFN 20). While describing the story of Nala and Damayanti, grandmother shed light on the “regal dignity and solemnity of a swayamvara” (Hariharan, TFN 18), the self-choice ceremony that will enable her to choose her husband. Devi’s concept of swayamvara and marriage comes out from her early childhood stories. By telling the story of the bravery and determination shown by Damayanti to espouse Nala, grandmother’s intention was to instill the qualities such as strong determination and courage in the mind of the little girl.

In the novel The Thousand Faces of Night, Hariharan equals the life of human characters with that of the myths. The stories narrated by Grandmother are rich in culture and strong in values as the listeners take everything granted for their future life. The dream like life of Devi came to an end when she was married to Mahesh after …show more content…

In a dominant patriarchal society like India, it is not uncommon to see women, pitted against an oppressive system, trying to turn the aggression against themselves resulting in self-inflicted wounds and penance. This in itself is a resultant factor of the realization of the impossibility of turning their anger against those who are inflicting humiliations on them. This hostility against oneself is best personified in the mythical figure of Gandhari in the Mahabharata. Actually the purpose of narrating Gandhari’s story was to tell Devi, what it is to be a real woman. But when she relates the story to her mother she learned a different lesson. She explained:
The lesson brought me five steps closer to adulthood. I saw, for the first time that my parents too were afflicted by a kind of blindness. In their blinkered world they would always be one, one leading the other, one hand always in the grasp of another. (Hariharan, TFN

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