Narrative Style of “The White Tiger”

"Narrative Style of “The White Tiger”

The White Tiger novel contains seven tatters which were writer separately, each in one night. The story is not narrated chronologically. The protagonist takes every freedom to move from one event to another without placing that event within a chain of action. Flashback method is also used in a shrewd way. The protagonist writes his letter to the Chinese premier when he is already established as an entrepreneur in Bangalor.

Arvind  Adiga took up the epistolary form for the white tiger and gave it necessary twist so as to incorporate elements from the stream-of –consciousness novels of the modern era and also from the postmodernist prose fiction having recognizable socio-cultural scenario without any symbolic intentions.

The protagonist’s name is thus revealed as well as his back-ground. And he dwells on each bit of information, providing the addressee, the details of everything. He narrates how he was given the name Balram by his school teacher as he had been known by ‘Munna’ meaning a boy. His parents or other family members did not have enough time for selecting his name,

 he writes.

The single paragraph highlights the essence of Adige’s style: wit, panache and dark humor. In an apparently simple style the narrator explores his past his anger, suffering, humiliation and detachment- and along with it the contemporary history of the land and the people.

The secret of Adiga’s innovative narrative style lies in juxtaposing an insignificant act of spitting on the hill top and the heinous act of slitting one’s master’s throat. The link between the two acts lien in the strong hatred generated in Balram’s mind. His ability to reach the top of the fort is suggestive of his fearlessness that he gradually gained.

A witty remark combining of Adiga’s uses of Irony, the essence of his narrative art. The area that is referred to as Darkness was the very place where the great enlightenment took place.

The entire novel is full of such witty remarks which fill the roader’s mind with a kind of joyfully submissive energy.

          When the entire narrative is constructed on a driver’s observation of facts, one may not expect a tight plot. Adiga is aware of the looseness of the plot and makes his protagonist confess that he cannot explain how the events described by him are connected to one another.

Comparing human mind to the entrails inside a car, Adiga suggests a mechanical approach to life according to which there is no conscious choice of an individual, because an individual is completely controlled by circumstances.

Use of rhetoric enriches his narrative style and also becomes a weapon of satire. Comparing the drudge of the poor to the condition of the brightly colored cages. Stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. The protagonist says, “The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years to its history is the Rooster Coop”. The comparison is further elaborated: “hundreds of pale hens.. Packed as tightly as warms in a belly, peaking each other and shitting on each other. Jostling just for breathing space: the whole care off a horrible stench the stench of verified, feathered flesh. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country”. It is because the common Indians are in the Rooster Coop, the protagonist emphasizes, and they cannot by going against the existing rules.

Adiga’s capacity to make the story interesting, even when it is the story of a pervert. Attracts the reader’s attention, he keeps up the suspense till the end of the book, as he follows some tricks used in a thriller. The revelation in the beginning of the novel that the protagonist murdered his master is one such trick, the readers are eager to know how that murder was committed and in which condition. The narrator rouses the reader’s anxiety as he goes on narrating apparently insignificant but interesting event, alluring the readers to be entangled in the story of murder.

In fact, Adige did not try a conventional novel with a tight plot and well drawn characters. Rather he chose to come close to the postmodernist narrative technique.

In his essay “postmodernist” narratives depend on the voice , a voice that is ‘panting’, ranting, and corrangling on in a space and time that it seems to be making a as it goes along, so that what ever we see in to see of the sconces it revokes is and emotion of this voice and liable at any moment to revocation “ .

The description of Balram’s voice “The white tiger interesting despite its harsh criticism of contemporarily life, thanks to the witty remarks that are scattered through the novel. The narrator’s voice, bold and   funny, spares no country or race, be it white, black or yellow.

The entire book is filled with such witty remarks full of satire and black humor, with which Adiga portrait a real picture of correlation and poverty in India while pointing at the failure of democracy in India. We doses not forget to comment that China has no democracy having revolt all the dark side of the village of Laxmangadh. He continues to call it a paradise and even sookes to comport it with a Chinese village.