An Analysis of Metaphors and Similes in "The

God of Small Things"

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examples/simile/) The God of Small Things
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things/)

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‘Her reality is magical. She has a heightened awareness of the natural world, of
smells and sounds, of colour and light. And she renders palpable this world, at
once strange and familiar, in prose of sinuous beauty… A small wonder of style
and compassion.’ (Jason Cowley, The Times)

With her sharp imagery, logical thought and emotional sensitivity, Arundhati Roy
presents before us a world we can very easily identify with. Her lucid language,
witty puns and quick and sudden shifts into thoughts serve to make us more
comfortable rather than to confuse us like Faulkner’s work does. She is more close
to Steinbeck in style than she is to Morrison, with an additional quality of excessive
use of similes and metaphors that help to lend more beauty to her work. Her
‘utterly exceptional masterpiece,’ The God of Small Things, justifies Rushdie’s
statement that ‘Literature is self-Validating.’ Along with the brilliance of its inter-
related themes and genuine tragic resonance, the novel appeals to our senses for
its marvelous descriptions. Roy attempts to ‘show’ rather than just ‘tell’ and this
she does, with great success.

Use of similes and the connections she makes between tangible objects and
imaginary feelings, between apparent realities and the ones buried deep down in
the untraded corners of our minds, between the objects we can visualize and the
ones we can just see with the eye of our soul, make her writing very, very
interesting. There is an abundance of similes on every other page and it appalls
the readers to imagine that with every other thing that she talks about, she can
think of something ‘else’ that simply and very interestingly connects with it. She
describes situations, people and their feelings and none of her descriptions go
without being compared to another natural object or feeling or action. Talking
about the lives of Estha and Rahel, she writes: Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks
and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short
creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have
gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died.
Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age. (Roy 3)

Very interestingly, we move with the flow and imagine where she makes us
imagine, all the things that she visualizes herself. Feelings are described in the
same fascinating manner. After Sophie Mol’s death, Mammachi is much grieved:
‘Her tears tickled down from behind them (glasses) and trembled along her jaw
like raindrops on the edge of a roof’ (Roy 5). Estha, standing close to Ammu, is
‘barely awake, his aching eyes glittering like glass.’ But during all this, Rahel’s
imagination is flying somewhere else: "Rahel thought of the someone who had
taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for
the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes and thinner. She imagined him up there,
someone like Velutha, bare bodied and shining, sitting on a plank, swinging from
the scaffolding in the high dome of the church, painting silver jets in a blue church
sky (Roy 6)." This is not all, she further imagines him ‘dropping like a dark star out
of the sky that he had made’ with ‘dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret.’
(Roy 6). Its all very visual and we can not only ‘see’ all the images, but see them as
clearly as the writer or her characters do.

Here lies the strength of the description of the writer. Blessed with the power to
create characters that appeal to our senses as vividly as the people around us do,
Roy makes us meet each one of them in person. We meet Estha who occupies
‘very little space in the world’ because of the strange ‘silence’ that has
encompassed his being. We see him ‘sweeping, swabbing’ and doing ‘all the
laundry’. We accompany him to the market place where he ‘never bargained.
They never cheated him.’ He appears to be a ‘quiet bubble floating on a sea of
noise.’ The silence that overwhelms him is no ordinary silence. It has taken over his
whole being: "Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached
out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm
of an ancient, foetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching
along the insides of his skull, hovering the knolls and dells of his memory,
dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue (Roy 12)." And
further we see that he ‘began to look wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in a
city. With sea secrets in him.’ (Roy 13)

His twin sister, Rahel, who ‘drifted into marriage’ with Larry McCaslin, ‘like a
passenger drifts towards an occupied chair in an airport lounge’ shares her twin
brother’s emptiness. This feeling of void is only another form of ‘quietness in the
other’. These ‘two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lover’s
bodies’. The description of these twins as toddlers is very interesting when we
jump back to the time when they grew their teeth. While Estha’s teeth were ‘still
uneven on the ends’, Rahel’s teeth were ‘waiting inside her gums, like words in a
pen. It puzzled everybody that an eighteen-minute age difference could cause
such a discrepancy in front-tooth timing’ (Roy 37)

The similes and metaphors that Roy employs very skillfully are simultaneously
tactile and surreal, like an overly vivid dream, and her story telling style seems to
be an amalgamation of the styles of Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck and Toni
Morrison. Her short and terse sentences deal with such vast notions that the
readers, mesmerized with her ability to convey her ideas vividly, can’t help
admiring her style. About Chacko, she writes, ‘He claimed to be writing a Family
Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish’.(Roy 38)

When the twins were born, Ammu ‘counted four eyes, four ears, two mouths, two
noses, twenty fingers and twenty perfect toe-nails’ but ironically enough, the
father of the twins, ‘stretched out on a hard bench in the hospital corridor, was
drunk.’ (Roy 41) Logically enough, with two children and ‘no more dreams’, Ammu
returns to her parents after being mal-treated by her husband and we justify the
act. Roy brilliantly juxtaposes the opposites through her comparisons. Describing
Ammu further, she explains the inner working of her brain like an ‘unmixable mix.
The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.’
Seen from the eyes of her twins, she sometimes seemed to be the ‘most beautiful’
woman they had ever come across. ‘And sometimes she wasn’t.’ (Roy 45). She
shocks us with her sudden shift in her last sentences and this works really well.

I believe Roy slowly reveals the layers of her mind and what it carries in it to the
readers. The tools she uses become stronger in her hands as she employs them
with full force and interest. Her similes and metaphors turn somewhat sour and
sweet simultaneously. The language she uses becomes her helper and sweeps
the minds of the readers bare before she can plant the seeds of her own thoughts,
as in the following synoptic quotation: "It was the others too. They all broke the
rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that
lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make
grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins,
jam jam and jelly jelly" (Roy 31). We can see that The God of Small Things captures
our attention for various reasons, of which its style is the strongest. It is a work that
validates the judgment of John Updike, who believes that, ‘A novel of real ambition
must invent its own language, and this one does’ (New Yorker).