The Foreigner Critical Analysis

The Self, it has been said, is the meeting spot of all the truths and relationships. The subject of Self has long been a matter in various intellectual discourses. Philosophically, Self is Atma, intricately joined with Parmatma in Hinduism as well as in Buddhist philosophy. Psychologically, Sigmund Freud has widely examined and written about the Self and relates the Self from infancy till late age in personality development. An individual often identifies Self with intelligence, intellect, idea, memory, perception, reason and will. In the current modern society, man is essentially not able to completely understand himself, because he has come under the possession of a number of theories beyond his understanding and control. He suffers from

This research concentrates primarily on two of these novels – The Foreigner and The Apprentice. Joshi’s The Foreigner (1968) is the first of his five novels which marked a fresh beginning in the literary circles of Indian English fiction. The Foreigner tells the impactful story of the protagonist named Sindi- The only son of an Indian father and an English mother, born in Kenya, orphaned at an early age and grown into a youth without family ties and without a country. He is a perennial outsider, an uprooted young man living in the latter half of the twentieth century who belongs to no country, no people and finds himself an outsider in Kenya, Uganda, England, America and India. It is story of his experience which has sense of estrangement and alienation from all meaningful relationship in society as well as from himself. He develops a philosophy of detachment, which is really a mask for his fear of committing himself, of getting involved too deeply with others. His theory of what he regards as 'detachment ' and non-involvement, ironically intensifies his sense of loneliness and estrangement. But this is not the entire story. The novel also portrays Sindi 's rising, his hindering because of his egotistical preoccupation with detachment, his realising its true meaning, and getting integrated with himself and the world by choosing a meaningful and purposeful course of action. Thus, finally the 'foreigner ' and the 'nowhere man ' in the sense that one who was earlier lost in the maze of life is able to arrive somewhere out of it and rehabilitate himself in society. The progress of his 'self’ may be graphed as a movement from self-absorption and self-centred withdrawal to a return for responsible participation. There is also an insight in the novel that he looks to something beyond the empirical world. Sindi’s case in this novel is not a study of an individual but rather ‘the whole of mankind’ suffering from the modern anxiety of cultural, social and