Archetype In Oleander Girl

The research is under Divakaruni’s most inspiring novel titled, Oleander Girl. Oleander Girl is a story about a young woman named Korobi Roy, whose parents died when she was an infant. Korobi has lived her entire life with her grandparents, Bimal Prasad Roy and Sarojini. She grew up with her grandparents’ love, care and with traditional Hindu background. In spite of her happy and content life, Korobi longs to know about her dead parents’ life and about their love journey. Often Korobi used to cherish herself with her mother’s unfinished love note to her father, which she found it as a child that was hidden in her mother’s book of poetry.

Her delightful life starts when she met Rajat Bose, with whom she found love and soon they are about

The word Archetype is taken from the Greek work, archetypum, which means ‘pattern’ or ‘model’. Theory of Archetype is first seen in the writings of Plato and Sophocles. Definition of Archetype, “An Archetype is a character, symbol or behavioral pattern that is basically an universal template for a character that is copied throughout all forms of storytelling”. Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, argued that the root of an archetype is in the “collective unconscious” of mankind that refers to shared experiences by a race or culture. This includes love, religion, birth, death, life, struggle, survival etc that exist in the individual’s subconscious memory and recreated in literary works.

The topic which is going to deal under this novel is about “The Complexities of Relationship in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s in Oleander Girl”. Divakaruni has given more importance to the family relationship in this novel and especially to the very notion of spouse relationship. There are so many couples in this novel like, Sarojini and Bimal Roy, Mr. and Mrs. Boses, Mitra and Seema and Rajat and Korobi. They all function from different perspective with their partnership that explains about both productive and disparaging situations of