Toni Morrison's True Sacrifice

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“ For year I was arrogant enough to think I owed him his life. But I know now I didn’t kill him; I couldn’t have, if I’d wanted. He gave himself up; it was sacrifice. I know I can’t understand it, I know I mustan’t try, for any real sacrifice is a mystery.”8 Both these girls Pecola and ila have been personalized into believing that they can be happy and beautiful only if they are light skinned, blonde haired and only if they posses a pair of blue eyes, this habituation makes Ila move away from her motherland. She begins to hate India, because it is these physical traits of an Indian, which separate her from the other students at her different schools. Ila also loathes the hyprocracy of the so called Indian …show more content…

Do you? Its only because I want to be free….. Free of you. She shouted back. Free of your bloody culture and free of all of you.”9 In her exploration of liberty, Ila gets profoundly entangled in an illusionary relationship with Nick Price. Illusionary because, just like Ila, Nick also lives in a world of illusion. Everything about about him is illusory. Ila puts up with his extra-marital affairs because she discovers: “That the squalor of the genteel little lives she had so much despised, was a part too of the free world she had tried to build for herself.”10 Ila is incompetent to free herself from the different intertwines of life because instead of accommodating the reality, she is running away. Tha’mma was running away from her past, whereas Ila is running from the present itself, which leads her deep into the entrapement of illusion. In precise, these three characters in Amitav Ghosh The Shadow Lines struggle to free themselves from their own dreaded past and present. To some extent they do succeed but yet there is something which still binds them all

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