Narayan’s Narrative technique in The Guide

In talking about oral narratives as models for writing his novels, and
then re-shaping them from contemporary perspectives, Narayan is
performing a radical art. He is recasting the novel, which is essentially a
Western middle-class realist art form concerned with tracing the fate of
an individual protagonist through a tightly structured plot. Narayan
recreates this in the mould of the Hindu epics and puranas, which are
digressive ad multi-faceted symbolic narratives that move easily
between the natural and the supernatural and prioritise the community
and its value over and above the individual. The significant variation lies
in compressing the ‘range’ of epics and puranas into a particle ( in other
words, the specificity of the novel), yet nevertheless keeping the
boundaries out of that particle as fluid as its mythical forbears in order
to negotiate multiple levels of experience.

There are two narratives in The Guide, nestling one inside the other.
The outer narrative, which is situated in the present, tells the story
from the point where Raju, a vagrant newly released from jail, meets
Velan on the river bank: it then follows Raju’s story from his assumed
‘sainthood’ right through to his ritual fast and presumed death. The
inner narrative, which takes place in the past, follows Raju from his
early childhood, through his adventures with Rosie, right up to his
release from Prison. The link between these two halves of Raju’s life is
the device of his confession_ through the association of ideas; Raju
goes back to the points in his past which he thinks will explain his
present predicament to Velan. Hence the past does not always unfold
in strict chronological order, but follows the vagaries of memory and
the immediate need to illuminate some point that Raju is making to
Velan. Thus when he tries to explain to Velan why the villagers were so
taken by his charisma, which would also explain why Rosie had in a
similar inexplicable manner succumbed to him earlier, Raju goes back
to the genesis of his career as a tourist guide. He came to be called as
Railway Raju. Strangers, who visit Malgudi, inquire about Raju as they
arrive at the station. Raju enjoys this popularity and regards himself as
a spokesman of Malgudi. The long chronological sweep of Raju’s
reminiscences in this chapter (Chapter 5), up to the beginning of his
liaison with Rosie, is also interrupted in the following chapter (Chapter
6) with a time shift to the more recent past and news of the draught
and the prayers of the villagers for the ritual fast. The dramatic
juxtaposition of these two widely separated phrases of Raju’s life
through the method of the interrupted narrative, actually helps to see
the connections between these two different episodes_ it is the same
flaw in Raju’s character, stemming not from vice but from kind of moral
laxity, which entraps him in each of these compromising situations.

This complicated interweaving of past and present through the inner

and outer stories is conveyed in terms of a two- fold plot or double
narrative. Raju himself recounts the sections relating to his past in the
first person autobiographical mode. The sections relating to the
present, which basically deal with Raju’s assumption of the role of the
swami and its consequences, are delineated by the omniscient third-
person or autobiographical voice. The two narratives weave in and out
of each other in a braided structure that metaphorically represents the
way in which a person’s past impinges on his present life, and in this
case entraps him. Raju is able to tell the story of his own past because,
being removed from it time, he can see his mistakes objectively and
asses his actions with detachment. For example, reflecting back on his
petulant behaviour with Rosie when his out on bail, Raju is now able to
see how unjust he was to Rosie. He is growing jealous of her self-
reliance but he forgets that all she does is for the sake of him. However,
raju is not the best narrator for the incidents of present because he is
too closely involved in the bewildering or self-serving or terrifying
emotions generated by these experiences. Therefore, Narayan’s
strategy is to use the omniscient narrator to portray these portions of
the story.

This double narrative or dual narrative told from two points of view_
the subjective (Raju’s) and the objective (the omniscient narrator)_
performs several dramatic structure functions in the text. Raju’s
narrative, which takes us inside of his mind and shown us how a
basically a good man slides into unforgiveable actions because of fairly
innocuous defects in his character, helps the reader to be involved in
raju’s fate and to sympathise with him. And the authorial narration,
however, distances Raju through its ironic tone, unmasks the
compromises and hypocrisies, and locates him within a social and moral
context on the basis of which we can judge him.

The double narrative is also futhered by Narayan’s style of narration.

The fact that, despite everything that he does the reader is not able to
dismiss Raju as an evil man, due to Narayan’s dexterous handling of the
third person narrative.

The greater part of the novel comprises Raju’s first section narrative
about his past. Only five of the eleven chapters focus on the third
person authorial account of his hypocritical present as a fake sadhu,
and even these five are interspersed with short-sections of first person
reminiscence. The cumulative effect is to give more prominence to the
evolution of Raju’s motives and decisions, than to evaluating them from
the point of view of conventional morality. It is a strategy aimed to
keep the reader sympathetic towards Raju. Raju’s first- person
narrative epresents the voice of the modern individual with his desire
for self-assertion, while the third-person authorial voice represents the
community and its demand for civic responsibility. The frequent
intersection of the two voices ensures that the reader’s simultaneous
involvement with, and condemnation with Raju_ that is, opposing
forces of reader’s sympathy and judgement_ are held in a delicate
balance. For complex moral vision of this book to work, for us to realise
the worth of tradition and spirituality while appreciating the human
difficulties of implementing traditional values in a modern materialistic
environment, we must neither totally reject Raju nor totally exonerate
him. We must keep our moral bearings and recognise Raju’s duplicity,
while at the same time we must applaud his final heroic decision to
sacrifice his life for his followers. It is the importance of dual plot or
narratives that enables Narayan to achieve this complex effect.