2022 IB Diploma Extended Essays

How does Arundhati Roy explore the impacts of cultural values on the lives of individuals in ‘The God of Small Things’? their colonial past, to some individuals, namely the twins, this history can have major impacts on their lives. This is supported by ‘Subalternity and Scale in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things ’, in which Elizabeth Outka analyses the novel through Postcolonialism and Trauma Theory, concluding that Roy utilises ‘temporal hybridity’, the mixture of different time frames within the novel, to represent how the collective trauma in Keralan society caused by the shared experience of colonisation has become ‘naturalised’. Specifically, Outka relates the temporal mixture of the novel to the Post-Colonialist theory of ‘hybridity’, which explores how literature expresses the melding of colonialist and traditional values, which causes new cultural values to be formed. In this way, society at large forgetting the specifics of their colonial past is representative of the normalisation of collective trauma. Ultimately, by emphasising the importance of preserving the details of Sophie Mol’s death, Roy implies the importance of exploring individual traumatic experiences, as it is only through these individual experiences that the truth of history can be understood. This justifies Outka’s link between temporal mixture and ‘hybridity’, as the blending of the past and present represents the blending of colonialist values into Indian society. The specific impacts of intergenerational trauma on Rahel are represented though the motif of Pappachi’s Moth, which “tormented [Pappachi] and his children and his children’s children” (49). The repetition of ‘children’ highligts the multi generational nature of the phenomenon, and therefore demonstrates how Pappachi’s Moth represents intergenerational trauma. The moth is seen to affect Rahel specifically, as she constantly feels “on her heart a drab moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts [unfurling] its predatory wings. Slow in. Slow out” (198). The lexical choice of ‘predatory’, as well as the imagery of slow and heaving breathing, demonstrates the pain caused by the existence of this intergenerational trauma. Centrally, Roy explores how colonial power leads to collective, intergenerational trauma within Keralan society, underpinning the influence of colonisation on the lives of individuals and families.

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