The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. In this essay, I will be closely analysing Roys use of language, structure and how intertextual references convey the innocence of youth in pages 193-198.

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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is a novel about the twin protagonists Estha and Rahel and the relationship between the two that develops from their childhood into their adulthood. In this essay, I will be closely analysing Roy’s use of language, structure and how intertextual references convey the innocence of youth in pages 193-198.

In this extract, Roy utilizes a multitude of linguistic devices in order to illustrate the idea of childhood. Roy immediately begins to use various techniques at the start of this chapter so that the readers understand Estha and Rahel; “Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol”- Ammu had originally introduced this title to make the twins understand the importance of Sophie Mol’s arrival so that they’d act to behave well. This clearly conveys the notion of youth because often when children are told stories by adults, they take it to be the literal truth and act as though the thing that they’ve been told is a reality. Therefore, it was essential that Roy placed this section in the novel to make us aware of the twins’ innocence in that they believe virtually anything. The fact that the title has been placed in italics represents Rahel and Estha’s thoughts in the sense that they actually consider themselves to be in a real life play as play titles are also presented in this manner. This conveys the siblings’ innocence as they believe everything told to them by adults. This also foreshadows what will happen later on in the novel - after being manipulated by adults throughout their life, they eventually break free, and incest occurs between the pair.  

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 Roy also employs phonetic spelling as another device to portray the youth of Estha’s mind. This is shown in the extract where instead of being spelt as Barn Owl, Roy chooses to spell it out as “Bar Nowl” and later on instead of spelling it as “An Owl”, Roy phrases it as “A Nowl”. She has done this in order to effectively present that the twins are young- children often speak combining two words together and when they’re Estha and Rahel’s age, they often mispronounce words and mimic the way they hear words from their seniors. By using this method, ...

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