Bye-Bye Blackbird Critical Analysis

Introduction:

Theorist Erik Erikson coined the term identity crisis and believed that it was one of the most important conflicts people face in development. According to Erikson, an identity crisis is a time of intensive analysis and exploration of different ways of looking at oneself.

Anita Majumdar Desai is the eminent and popular writer. She is one of the best contemporary women writers of Indian fictions in English, and the Emeriti John E. Burchard professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has given many famous novels to the world literature. In most of her novel we find the protagonist dealing with quest for identity in one or another way. In Bye-Bye Blackbird, Desai captures the immigrant’s dilemma on strange new soil in the image of the blackbird. Nostalgia and alienation, rejection and acceptance of the colonizer’s identity, are dualities deftly braided together in this work of East-West tensions an oppositions. Desai

He feels alienated in London from both Indians and English men. There is a lack of sympathy in English men, the silence and hollowness London disturb dev and makes him uneasy and alienated. He finds himself insulted and isolated. Due to this he suffers from identity crisis. The immigrants are not at all happy with their life at England. Dev takes his final decision not to return to India a not to lead the way of the masses there. He slowly and steadily adapts himself to the new environment. His friend Adit Sen, a young man from India lives in England with his English wife. For him England is fertile, luxurious and prosperous. The novel Bye-Bye Blackbird which has an international theme in the sense that Adit marries an English girl Sarah and by doing so he incurs the anger of the white society. Ironically, it is not Adit who suffers most on this account but his docile wife Sarah. A clear description of Sarah’s identity crisis is found in the