Commentary on "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

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Commentary on The God of Small Things

        The extract from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is a descriptive extract with plenty of imagery about a “grand old house”, known as Ayemenem House, where a lady called Mammachi lives. The extract is a continuous description of the house in no particular order, rather a random one i.e. Arundhati describes the roof, the doors and then goes back up to the verandah. This is done in no particular order and hence may represent the path the speaker took as he or she was exploring the Ayemenem House. Arundhati vividly describes the different aspects of the house with minute details and exceptional imagery in order to portray the uniqueness of the house.

        To begin with, the author’s first sentence in this extract tends to provide a general idea of house as she mentions that “it was a grand old house…but aloof-looking”. The use of the word ‘old’ indicates that the house has been there for a long period of time and may be a historical house related to Mammachi’s family history. Similarly, the word ‘aloof-looking’ creates an image of the house being remote and distant, thus reflecting on the age of the house. The reader is immediately directed into believing that the house is old-aged and therefore the rest of the extract will be dull and boring due to the vocabulary ‘old’ and ‘aloof-looking’ that was mentioned in the first line.

        In the same way, the second line of the extract adds more clarification to the fact that the house is “aloof-looking” thus highlighting the unpleasantness of the house. The second sentence says “As though it had little to do with the people that lived in it.” This sentence heightens the fact that the house looks very unfriendly (‘aloof’) as ‘it ha[s] little to do with the people that live in it”. This manner of beginning the extract tends to de-motivate the reader into reading the rest of it because the descriptions of the house already sound very dull and create dreary mood.

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        Furthermore, the second stanza changes the mood of the extract with more exciting images and descriptions. The first sentence of the paragraph is linked to the previous one whereby there are unpleasant images of the roof and their descriptions are unattractive, for instance when he says the “tiled roof had grown dark and mossy with age and rain.”  The mossy image of the roof creates a nasty and repulsive image, thus reinforcing the oldness of the house. However further into the paragraph, there are interesting images of the wooden frames that were carved into the gables. The “patterns on the ...

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