Anita Nair’s first novel The Better Man, set in a fictitious village called Kaikurussi in Kerala, explores the theme of relationships, loyalty, betrayal and self-fulfilment. It also deals with the caste issues of the times and the sufferings of women during that period. But Nair is more concerned about the suffering and status of women in their families in the early part of the twentieth century. The novel has as its protagonist a retired government employee called Mukundan who has been forced by circumstances to return to his village Kaikurussi, an imaginary village in the northern part of Kerala, from which he had fled when he was eighteen in order to escape the tyranny of his father. Though the novel traces the growth and the eventual redemption of timid Mukundan into a better man with courage and self-confidence, it subtly highlights the idea that the domineering nature of his father and the disharmony in his parents’ marital life are the real reasons for his failure in life. His mother Paru Kutty, who had to suffer humiliation and ill treatment from her husband, could not escape the brutality of her husband as her son failed to rescue her from the cruelty …show more content…
He imagines his mother finding fault with him for his callousness. “Where were you when I needed you? You could have rescued me, but you chose not to” (TBM 31). Her earnest request to her son to take her away to a safe place far away from her husband fails as he is scared to confront his father, and thus leaves her all alone at his father’s mercy. So whatever be his justification for not taking care of his mother, his mother vehemently criticizes the attitude of her husband and son in not helping the weak and the defenceless. According to Elisabeth Bumiller, “The great tragedy of many Indian women was their profound powerlessness to control any aspect of their lives”
Throughout the novel the father's love for his son pushes him to protect him no matter the risks. For example in the novel many times the two would go to an abandoned house
In this article, “Why We Love TV’s Anti-heroes,” the author Stephen Garrett argues that in today’s society our whole perspective of heroes has changed since the mid-twentieth century. Garrett is appealing to all American’s who love watching their favorite TV heroes and heroines. In addition, Garrett’s main focus is the fact today’s heroes entirely different from what the idea of a “hero” was two or three decades ago. The author relies on generally accepted ideas from the American public to base his main idea; he uses sources from popular TV shows and movies which have anti-heroes that draw the attention of their audience.
“He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself. Too late to save your old father…You could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup… It was only a fraction of a second, but it left me feeling guilty.” At the end, he is able to regather himself and care for his father until his final days; Although, still under the burden of tremendous stress and guilt for wishing death upon his
During this day he realizes that his mom had to make many sacrifices for him,
This is shown when he is caught trying to steal a quarter from a pizza shop and buy food with it where he is caught by the cook. The cook speaks with him and then he is soon picked up by a police officer, but when asked why he ran away from home he never gave away everything about his mother, he could have told the police officer everything she has done but he kept quiet and was picked up by his father and they just stated it was a misunderstanding. Also at the very end of the second novel when he is talking with his mother on the phone before leaving for the Air Force, he could have expressed his anger and say how terrible she was but he did
Although, he feels loved by his mother, that's always there for him when hes has no one to turn too. He says “ She loved me, in some mysterious sense I understood without her speaking it” (Gardner 17). She the only person that helps him when he's
to still keep established pace and tone, which is that calm, disassociated mood. At this point the father, the reader might think, is a construction of the husband’s mind, because the husband had focused on “the idea of never seeing him again. . . .” which struck him the most out of this chance meeting, rather than on the present moment of seeing him (Forn 345). However surreal this may be in real life, the narrator manages to keep the same weight through the pacing in the story to give this story a certain realism through the husband’s
On page 101 he mentions that he felt the emptiness of the house settling down around him. Where was his mother? Where had all the people who used to fill these rooms gone to? On page 101 he whispered “Daddy…”, “Mama…”. This is a reason that shows why his relationship with his parents is distant.
He explains his guilt that “burns like acid in [his] veins” as the leftover feelings from his childhood remain “as though [he] were still concealing the family shame” (744). This descriptive language showcases how deeply and painfully this trauma has been within in as he has made his own life for himself. He saves this for the end of his essay so that he does not pull too much of the audience’s sympathy from other people who made need it “more.” He introduces the topic of physical violence by writing that “[his] own father never beat [them]” (740)—a curious phrase as he goes on to say that the image was so vivid in his mind that it felt tangible and real. There is an emphasis on the absence of physical violence, but also an admittance of how the threat of such can be just as painful and imprint such images on the brain for years to come.
This boy, paralleling the boy in “From Childhood,” is being smothered so much so that it is impacting his life negatively. Though some might argue that his attention induced embarrassment is typical of a growing child, context clues point to his mother’s overbearing nature as the direct culprit of his discomfort. The relationship between the parties of both “From Childhood” and “Mother and Son” are uncanny. But even so, the way in which the mother in “Mother and Son” acts overbearingly differs to that of the overbearing actions of the mother in “From Childhood,” thus giving this maternal relation its own place on the wide-ranged
“What I did not know was that my father would wheedle and and plead his way past them…”. This quote shows the respect the son is gaining for his father and his ability to get him back home earlier than predicted. The mother is
He shows random acts of kindness to strangers his father remains cautious of. He seeks to understand why the gangs are ‘bad’ and believes that deep down, they too are loving. The mother did an unspeakable act that seems cruel at most looks, but to her, she was proving her love to her son, trying to give him a better life. The power of love will always transcend after death, and that is why love will always exist in a broken
It was there morbidity. This was the real issue between us as it had been between her and my father,”(45). James’s mother is desperate to cure her son of his lies, so much as she doesn’t realize that she is hurting him. James’s mother is distraught and is upset with the fact that he is an outsider and unlike his other siblings. Because his mother does not understand his problem James is yearning to get away from her and find out who he can be without being under the influence of her.
In this scene, the man recalls the final conversation he had with his wife, the boy’s mother. She expresses her plans to commit suicide, while the man begs her to stay alive. To begin, the woman’s discussion of dreams definitively establishes a mood of despair. In the
Through this struggle, the little boy demonstrates his fear yet forgiveness towards his dad and allows us to understand his predicaments. Roethke’s strong diction encompasses images of both fear and unconditional love that portray the complexities of violence both physically and emotionally for the intricacies in his relationship with his