An Ecocritical Perspective of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

This study is an ecofeminist reading of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things focusing on how the novelist utilizes various techniques signaling modes of revolt of Nature in terms of the muted group theory and backchannel communication motifs. The novelist also apostrophizes Nature to blur dialectical pairs. Cartesian dualism is extended to the culture/nature dichotomy. Roy encompasses the subaltern of the human race within the downtrodden, the predominant being the image of woman imprisoned in the presets of immanence. On another level, the author refers to animals and plants that required a voice that told the story of Nature or of innate instinct through the medium of human beings: an inverted form of apologues where the story of humans was told through animals. Symbiotic relationships of nature gather strength as they are foregrounded by Roy through relations of metaphor and metonymy exhibiting underlying principles of kinship. The survival instinct of the female characters is delineated through the language of ecology and emblematizes the dismantling of boundaries in the culture/nature dialectical pair.