Rhetorical Analysis of Globalization in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

Although this essay does not directly address real-life examples of neoliberalism’s effects on class, race, culture, gender, ethnicity and so on, in the United States, it does analyze neoliberalism’s connections to globalization, which reverberates throughout Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things. In this narrative, the consequences of British imperialism, a precursor to neoliberal thinking, and globalization, a direct consequence of the neoliberal framework, exacerbate the violence that inextricably links the Ipe, Kochamma, and Paapen families. Roy’s novel, moving forward and backward in time, suggests that what happens to families, at the local level, is directly linked to larger political and economic forces. Moreover, I contend that, because history is inescapable in the world of the novel—even for those who are seemingly more powerful than others—several characters who inhabit that world constantly attempt to adjust their constructed realities to uphold the remnants of British rule and the well-established framework of the Indian caste system. Remarkably, however, it is not these characters who suffer the consequences of their actions; in reality, it is the children, their divorced mother, and the Untouchable worker who are made to suffer for the misdeeds of others.  In poetic and yet stark language, Roy demonstrates how these victims are irreparably harmed and, in the case of the worker, at least, killed at the hands of the state. Specifically, the ways in which British imperialism and globalization affect the world of the novel can be seen in the connections between the local and the global, and the disappearance of bodies.