Malgudi Days Analysis

The stories in Malgudi Days are like fairy tales. Their plots, characters, structures may be different to each other, but they are same in one aspect, i.e., they are all made to impress the reader and “the consumption of one leads to a strong craving for more” (Smith, Alexander McCall). While reading the stories a reader can easily find that they are purely based on Indian landscape and society, and each story is different from the other and has the same power to provoke him, as Jhumpa Lahiri finds out, for “gobbling up one tale after the next” ( Narayan, Malgudi Days, p.vii). The greatness of Narayan does not lie in the characterization or in the plot construction; rather he shows his greatness in the theme of his stories. Narayan’s Malgudi Days is a collection of short stories, based on Malgudi: “…the place is imaginary and not to be

In the story Out of Business we find that the relationship between Rama Rao and his wife is shaken by economic crisis. We see here Rama Rao’s wife plays the role of a financial minister of her house. When her husband had a job they lived in a bungalow. But when he lost his job, she “sent away the cook and the servant; withdrew the children from fashionable nursery school and sent them to a free primary school” (Narayan, Malgudi Days, p.91-92). They left the bungalow and moved to a small house. She saves money and seriously uses pie to pie to continue her household. This conjugal dependable relationship is stirred when Rama Rao began to quarrel with his wife when she refused to give money for the ‘cross-word puzzles’ as “five rupees were nearly a week’s food for the family” (Narayan, Malgudi Days, p.94). In Wife’s Holiday we also find that the conjugal relationship between Kannan and his wife also affected by economic problem. Thus it is clear that money plays a key role in the development of human