Roy's The God of Small Things: A Metaphor for Suffering and Death

This paper looks into Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things as a metaphor for suffering and death, offering the reader a profound reflection on parallelism that runs through the conflict between the ‘public world’ of caste, class, politics, regional and the national differences and the ‘private despair‘ of those who are affected by these differences. In The God of Small Things, Roy focuses on two tragic events in 1969 – the drowning of the twins’ nine year old Anglo-English cousin, Sophie Mol, and the murder of Velutha, the Untouchable carpenter loved by the twins and their divorced mother, Ammu. The story has been told mainly from the perspective of seven-year-old Rahel and Estha, "two-egg twins"(Roy 4), and from that of Rahel twenty-three years later. The unfolding of the links between these two tragedies and the conflicts that drives the narrative makes The God of Small Things a metaphor for suffering and death.