The White Tiger Essay

The White Tiger written by Aravind Adiga is a bildungsroman telling the tale of how the peasant Balram rises to power. From a simple village boy, Balram becomes the founder of a corrupt and successful driving company. The majority of his journey he picked up small lessons from his master, Ashok on how he survives in the fast paced business world. Balram observes his masters actions and eventually becomes more successful than him, but consequently loses his innocence. Adiga uses corruption to explore morality, which is significant because the protagonist is sent on a challenging moral dilemma. People of power in India are of the light and have a deep understanding of how to be successful. Balram is a servant and believes he is innocent compared

After killing his old master, he soon picked up his name and lived life as if nothing happened. Balram is so accustomed to his new life because he was already corrupted and can easily adapt to it. Balram says, “the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity, and wickedness”(167). It is interesting to note how he mentions all men who have been citified are wicked and the village folk are fools. In order to be citified you have to do something awful and the worse you become, the more popular and powerful you become. Balram hypothesizes that is why nobody can escape the rooster coop, because all the village folks are innocent and foolish. A man’s identity and caste is everything in India, but more specifically Balram says, “To sum up—in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up”(54). Balram knows in order to be in the caste of men with big bellies he needs to alter his personality. So to fit in he becomes his master, Mr.