Cry, The Peacock

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The novel begins with the death of Toto and ends with Gautam’s murder and Maya’s insanity. The fear of the threatened death, though initially submerged, surfaces periodically to haunt, unnerve and terrify Maya: “And four years it was now, we had been married four years… I knew the time had come it was now to be Gautama or me”1. This pendulum of predicted death precariously swining from the ceiling gradually descends and threats to fall over her head any moment.
The mounting fear of death begins Slackens Maya’s hold over herself, drawing her closer to insanity. She begins to have hallucinations of various odd creatures – of the dead ants who got drowned in attempting to drink the sweet oil, of doves” as omens of ill fortune, of separation” asking her to go away, of rats causing plagues, and of lizards in whose hissing sounds she hears “ the death rattle.” The dark spaces between the stars signify her separation.
There was not one of my friends who could act as an anchor anymore and to
The absence of relief from any quarter unnerves her. With her sickened imagination and neurotic mind, she begins to form many frightening images from remotely correspondingly objects after being to convince that she has been caught in the net of the inescapable and there was no possibility of mercy. During daytime, she suspects them not to be nightmare but in the night, her “memories came to life were so vivid, so detailed, I knew them to be real, too real. Or is it madness?” (PP.97.98)
When Maya comes to realize in the fourth year that her days are numbered, love for life spring in her and she becomes hysteric over the oncoming threat of death. She claims in desperation: “Am I gone Insane? Father! Husband! Who is my savior? I am in need of one. I a...

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...th the help of flashback technique. This is done to convey the inner consciousness of Maya, of course, the chronology is not much disturbed here as in stream – of – consciousness novel like Faulkner’s the sound and the Fury. Wyndham Lewis complained that the stream – of – consciousness writer “robs work of all linear properties whatsoever, of all contour and definition….. The romantic abdominal within method in a jelly fish structure, without articulation of any sort.” 3

Works Cited

1. Anita Desai, Cry, The Peacock (New Delhi: Orient Paper-backs, 1980), PP.22-23. Subsequent quotations from the novel are from this edition and page numbers are again in Patentheses within the text.
2. Sidney Finkelstein, Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature (New York: International Publishers, 1965), P.137.
3. Quoted by Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel, P.91.

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