Individuality In The Better Man

The Hunt for ‘Individuality’ in ‘The Better Man’

Abstract

Anita Nair, a post-colonial novelist, writes for the women’s emancipation. She deftly handles the issues faced by the women of today and aids them to arrive at a decision when they meet the same problems. The present day women like to assert their individuality and no longer wish to be suppressed by the male dominated society. In The Better Man the search for identity is not by a woman but by a man, Mukundan Nair. Hence it is clear that Anita Nair is not a feminist but a champion for those in distress.

Keywords: Kaikurissi, ghosts, self- centeredness, inner peace, self-assertion, Dostoevskian touch

Introduction

Anita Nair emerges as a skilled story writer, since she has essentially entwined several minuscule tales into a remarkable portraiture of a fiction. The Better Man is an ideally carved fiction of a man and his dreads, and the encounters he met to ascertain his self-esteem and individuality.

Characters are acquainted with all the way through the fiction

Anita Nair’s “The Better Man” (2000), the induction novel is fixed in a small imaginary village called Kaikurissi in Kerala. Four years old Mukundan who has seen his father only in photographs, is scared when his father suddenly returns from Burma. Dressed in black and appears tall and when he starts talking to him, Mukundan gets more afraid and starts calling his mother. When he was eight years old the relationship between his father and him did not improve. It has become worse and Achuthan Nair chooses to settle in the village of Kaikurissi after resigning his job. Achuthan Nair is left with the question and Mukundan is expected to answer on his own but he merely repeats his father’s last words. “Mukundan is tortured by hatred of his father, Achuthan Nair, who bullied him and intimated him since his childhood” (Sengupta,