Talkative Man Short Story

The World of Talkative Man in the Stories of R.K.Narayan
Dr.A. Phaniraja Kumar

Engine Trouble: In this story, the Talkative Man tries to make a story out of the fantastic idea of winning a road steam engine for a prize and its possible consequences. The winner of a steam road engine in a lottery finds that the prize is a perfect white elephant for him. It lands him into all kinds of trouble and expense when he tries to get it moved. He is charged rent for parking it, and in the attempt to get it moved by the temple elephant instead, involving further damages. In the end, there is a lucky earthquake during which the engine falls into a dilapidated well, which involved at one stroke the problems of the owners of both the engine and

Instead of a road steam engine we have here an equally improbable object, a huge statue of molten lead, which the narrator gets free of cost from the Malgudi Municipality. This story is the most satirical of the Talkative Man’s stories and rouses good-humoured larger at many of the lapses, commissions and omissions of municipal councillors and petty local politicians. But the Talkative Man is too good a man to be a pungent and indignant satirist. As a short story Lawley Road is much better organised than Engine

Narayan’s technique of the short story clearly shows him subscribing to the idea of the ‘well-made short story’. Almost all his short stories are compact and neatly structured. In the ‘well-made short story’ the beginning and the end are of crucial importance and Narayan like. Henry rarely fumbles in handling either. A typical Narayan story may begin in a variety of ways. The endings of Narayan’s short stories show a strong influence of O. Henry’s celebrated technique of the trick finale. All the stories in which irony, either comic or tragic plays a shaping role naturally have a surprise ending like in Engine Trouble. The setting for most of Narayan’s stories is Malgudi. His stories appear to be, by and large, a museum of minor motifs. They lack the kind of thematic weight and the richness of experience which the major short stories of experience which the major short stories of the world invariably possess. His stories are invariably simple and short, with the exception of the long story, “A Horse and The Two Goats”. Narayan’s medium is a ‘Bharat Brand of English’. It is a style and simple, unadorned but has the naturalness of common speech. There is no authorial intrusion of stifle language or coloured adjectives. This style is characteristically modern-it has the lucidity that