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The God Of Small Things Textual Analysis

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Textual Analysis
The focus of this chapter is on The God of Small Things, a novel in which Roy violates the “Love Laws” of the Standard English. Although the novel is written primarily in English, however, this English is highly unusual, particularly for monolingual speakers of English. This unusual uniqueness of Roy’s English arises from the use of the linguistic strategies of abrogation and appropriation. She abrogates and appropriates Standard English by using glossing, untranslated words, interlanguage and lexical and syntactical innovations. All these terms will be explained with textual examples to illustrate the use of language and its effects.
Since the novelty of Roy’s language is a linguistic feast and embodies, what many have termed …show more content…

In The God of Small Things Roy has used a brand of English that very often deviates from the established norms of Standard English. These deviations has taken place at various levels, such as words, phrases, sentences, italics, uppercase letters, spellings and punctuation marks. These deviant details in the novel are so abundant that a random enumeration of these may be inefficient and imprecise. Therefore, an attempt is made here to categorize them under different headings.
The defining characteristic of The God of Small Things is its strong regionalist identity which represents the socio-cultural life of Kerala, India. The story of the novel set in a small village, Ayemennem near Kottayam in Kerala, India, with its natural beauty dominated by the historical Ayemennem House and its inmates, the Ipe family, for over four generations. With extensive use of Malayalam language, Roy firmly establishes the novel in the soil of Kerala. The regional flavor of Kerala even further enhanced by Roy’s topographical descriptions of Ayemennem landscape, its weather and the defining characteristic of Ayemennem, namely the Meenachal River with its verities of fish locally known as ‘pallathi,’ ‘paral,’ ‘korrri’ and ‘karimeen’(203). While the spell bound graphic descriptions of Kathakali, along with Malayalam folk and film songs delicately represents the beauties of native

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