Arun Joshi is quite an exceptional novelist who stands apart from the rest of the novelists, who has taken up the themes of human predicament in almost all his novels. The overall and outstanding quest in all his novels is for a concrete direction and meaning in one’s life. Joshi has been influenced by existential thinkers like Camus, Sartre and this can be observed in his novels. Existentialism is a modern philosophic movement that deals with ‘man’s’ disillusionment and despair which originated in the philosophical and literary writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Joshi has elaborately handled the struggles of a sensitive soul inching its way facing formidable odds within him and within the social situations around, towards self realization.
According to Lionel Trilling, novel is a perpetual quest for reality and one of the most effective agents of our imagination. The Indian novel in English has now become an integral part of Indian English. In between 1920 and 1950’s the themes in Indian English Novels were mostly depicted on national movements for political independence. After Independence most of the Indian English Novelists shifted their focus from nationalistic zeal to find new themes and portray them. They began to delineate from their works and set about for the individual’s quest for the ‘self’.
One such significant contemporary Indian English novelist is Arun Joshi. Arun Joshi has paved the way to explore and implement new themes in his novels. He takes the readers to unknown and unexplored regions through his novels. He has focused mostly on the deeper layers of man’s being. His novels explore more on the protagonist’s suffering from the same disease, dilemma, discontent and frustrations. ...
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Hermann Hesse’s novel “Siddhartha” is one of spiritual renewal and self discovery. The novel revolves around the life of one man named Siddhartha, who leaves his home and all earthly possessions in an attempt to find spiritual enlightenment. The novel contains many themes, including the relationship between wisdom and knowledge, spirituality, man’s relationship to the natural world, time, love, and satisfaction. To portray these themes, Hesse employs many different rhetorical devices, particularly diction, symbolism, and point of view. These devices allow us, as a reader, to reevaluate our lives and seek fulfillment in the same way that Siddhartha did.
Hermann Hesse and Albert Camus were both talented authors whose works have greatly influenced the world of literature. Hesse’s Siddhartha and Camus’ The Stranger have impacted readers for decades. These novels centralize around a common principle of finding inner truth. The main characters, Siddhartha and Meursault, have very different ideologies by which they live their lives. These opposing perspectives greatly influence their individual decisions and the people around them. The style in which each of these novels is written exemplifies these differences between Siddhartha and Meursault. The impact of the opposing perspectives of Siddhartha and Meursault on their individual decisions and on the people around them is seen through the styles of Siddhartha and The Stranger.
While “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” and “Rejection” are different in structure but similar in style, they convey the same desire for escape. The two vignette seem to belong in Franz Kafka’s “Meditation” because of they have this conception of escape. After all, to meditate is to escape the physical world in order to look within oneself. Entertainment in general, including the practice of reading novels for enjoyment, is a form of escapism that allows people to relieve themselves from the banal aspects of daily life.
The novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is a timeless story about one man’s journey of finding peace in his way of life and thoughts. Siddharta is a young Brahmin’s son, who is dissatisfied with his worship and in turn sets out to find the lifestyle that is right for him. Siddhartha is faced with many external, physical conflicts, yet that is not the most prominent type of conflict in the story. Hesse builds excitement and suspense through Siddhartha’s internal journey to create an emotional response usually associated with external conflict.
Great works of literature often teach readers about the human condition, or the nature of humans and how they live their lives. Characters are like real people dealing with real and relatable situations. Literature describes how these characters handle these situations and the emotions they have towards them. Essentially, the human condition in literature is a reflection of how we live our lives. In The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, the characters are faced with the challenge of feeling alienated or alone in the world. Through this, the reader can learn how humans deal with a situation where they do not feel as if they fit in.
An existentialist believes an individual’s existence is absurd unless he adds meaning to it through his own actions. In the novels The Stranger and The Metamorphosis, the authors, Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, tell their stories from different perspectives. Using points of view, the authors show their characters’, Mersault and Gregor, alienation to convey the existential concept of authenticity. One becomes authentic when he or she lives their life according to how they define themselves.
Existentialism is defined as "a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining his or her own development through acts of the will”. In other words, existentialism it emphasizes individual freedom. Throughout The Stranger, the amount of existentialism views is abundant. The use of Mersault’s experiences covey the idea that human life has no meaning except for simple existence. The idea of existentialism in Albert Camus' The Stranger reflects through Mersault's life experiences with his relationship with Marie, the death of his mother Maman, the murdering of the Arab, and Mersault's trial and execution, all these events show that Mersault’s life of no meaning.
Mehta, Kamal. “Naipaul as a Short Story Writer”. V. S. Naipaul: Critical Essays Vol. 3. Edited by Ray, Mohit Kumar. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2005. Print.
Right from the ancient epics and legends to modern fiction, the most characteristic and powerful form of literary expression in modern time, literary endeavour has been to portray this relationship along with its concomitants. Twentieth century novelists treat this subject in a different manner from those of earlier writers. They portray the relationship between man and woman as it is, whereas earlier writers concentrated on as it should be. Now-a-days this theme is developing more important due to rapid industrialization and growing awareness among women of their rights to individuality, empowerment, employment and marriage by choice etc. The contemporary Indian novelists in English like Anita Desai, Sashi Deshpande, Sashi Tharoor, Salman Rusdie, Shobha De, Manju Kapoor, Amitav Ghosh etc. deal with this theme minutely in Indian social milieu.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He is one of the leading Indian writers in English who interweaves nature with experience and history. His works show an interaction between nature and human. He has published many fictions such as The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), In An...
The English Teacher, by Indian novelist R. K. Narayan, tells the story of a young professor, Krishna, who must adapt first to family life with his wife and daughter and then to his wife's death. This short novel, written in simple prose, examines many large issues--love, death, loyalty, fate--but always with equanimity. Krishna teaches himself, and the novel tries to teach us, to be, as it is put by the novel's last words, "grateful to life and death."
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
Arun Joshi one of the foremost novelists in India published his first novel in the year 1971. The Foreigner (1971) is the story of a young man, Surinder Oberoi who is depressed and almost alienated, a man who sees himself as a stranger wherever he lives or goes to Kenya where he is born, in England where he is a student and in India where he finally resolves. The strange case of Billy Biswas (1971) is a novel about she struggles of a woman who is through the emotional shock of a divorce plus a cruel divorce settlement imposed on her.
Crane, Ralph J. Inventing India: A History of India in English Language Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Dr. Agarwal Beena. Chetan Bhagat : A voice of Seismic Shift in Indian English Fiction. Jaipur : Y King Books, 2013.