Margaret Nowak, Madeline Curtis, Katie OLaughlin, Michael Casas, and Hina Akmal

Prompt: Fiction is by its nature artificial: it provides a means of conferring shape, pattern and order on chaos. To what extend do you find this statement to be true in The God of Small Things Most authors write books to capture a personal memory, tell a story, teach a lesson, and much other important information you can learn, all these books are written with a purpose. Fiction comes from the perspective of the author, with bits and pieces coming from truth and it all came together. It is hard to find authors who can take the chaos and rumble of bits and pieces of memories in their mind and put in such a form of writing where it makes sense. Arundhati Roy, the author of the novel The God of Small Things ties in her readers through this sort of chaotic writing style. Arundhatis Roys form of fiction is an artificial writing because she writes about specific parts of her childhood, social issues, love laws, and equality between class wealth based off of each character it leads to a different topic of the story that she has created, that helps the reader get to experience it just from reading it. Arundhatis Roys structure and overview of her form of fiction is a chaotic rumble of memories and truth that in some crazy way all have an orderly meaning too. Arundhati Roy was grown and raised most of her childhood in a village called Ayemenem, which is also where her novel took place. This novel captures many major events, and childhood experiences Roy had, which was the main reason why the story is so authentic an nonfictional. Later on in life Roy went on to study architecture and became a professional architect. Roys knowledge from her studies has helped her develop her writing style for this novel. Roy was even quoted once saying that, Im not trained as

Margaret Nowak, Madeline Curtis, Katie OLaughlin, Michael Casas, and Hina Akmal

an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeatpatterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in physical space. And the same works in writing, Ive found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as wellthe graphic design of the language. Roy personal nature to build her story in a structure through architect is obvious by the way she switches from each topic. The novel started out at Sophie Mols funeral, this chronologically shouldnt occur until the end of the story. It starts on page eleven in the novel, its the first time Roy flash forwards to the future where the story is originally told. It says on that page that, And now twenty-three years later, their father had re-Returned Estha. Throughout the rest of the novel Roy continued to shape the story and went back and forth in time, switching perspectives, and writing in a random and purposeful style. The construction of God of Small things was important to Roy because of what all the content in the novel and the personal stories. Roy was an activist who strongly devoted herself into politics in India; it put Roy in a position on individual and specific political controversies during 1969-1993, time periods of the novel. In the middle of the novel when the novel talks about the communist status in India Roy say This time as part of a coalition between what had now become two separate parties-the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Roy talks about the political status of the communism in India subtly and we did not realize what a big deal this was until the end of book. When you look closer and the see the little subtle details much more of these show the realness and truth of the novel. Roy uses this to create each character and bases their story of the novel in what was really happening. Due to this mix

Margaret Nowak, Madeline Curtis, Katie OLaughlin, Michael Casas, and Hina Akmal

of lies and truth which leads to Roys writing style to come across to readers as more nonfictional than fiction. Since Roy became and architect in college and the one main thing that is important to architect is format, the format of the novel was important to Roy and the way she laid out each event in the novel. Roy used a mixture of flashbacks and flash forwards to create a jumbled order of timeline of events, which created for a lot of confusion throughout the book. The way the book ends most people would think it is just starting, because it brings everything together and helps make everything make sense and explains why everything happens in the book. This is an architect way because it wraps it up at the end you can finally see all the puzzles fitting into their place with this. Another way the book is structured is that you can literally pick a random page and start from their and not be confused because once you get to the end it will make sense even if you go back to the part where you started. Roy jumped from a lot of memories, which confuses people, but she was really just connecting all the dots together and just making it seem more manipulative then it originally should have been foreseen as. In the end of the book after reflecting on all that is read, the reader can see that it was all just a simple story told that jumped from scenery to scenery whether it was about life, love, or just simply a memory from Roys life, they all had a meaningful purpose that related back to real life events occurring in India and occurring in her daily life that made the structure of the book very confusing but when looking closely it is easy to see that it all comes together in the end of the novel and even makes a little more sense.