Anita Desai, a prominent contributor to the
development of Indian English novel is commended for her art of
characterization. As a novelist of high order, she has the dexterity to create
characters that are unique and solitary. Her characters are lonely, introverted,
disconsolate, disconcerted, frustrated, free minded, obstinate and tragic. Her
galaxy of characters is a world of richness, variety and complex. Her
characters are life-like and represent the world which we live. Each of her
characters is an unfathomable mystery who reveals their realization of self,
the agony of hopelessness, their sense of alienation, their search for
identity, their indomitable courage in deciding their own way of action, their
persistent fight against the social and economic bondage, and their
psychological conflicts.
Desai’s protagonists are basically tragic and they
fail persistently. They are psychologically disturbed, morbid, self-absorbed
and incoherent in their manner and disjointed expressions. They are confronted
with a hostile social environment and they fall into a state of passiveness.
They share their experience and
perceptions about life and try to search for the real meaning of life. The
characters live a lonesome life and love privacy.
In the novel, Voices in the City , Nirode a young man of twenty-five admits
himself that he is “a congenital failure”(8) in the heartless and soulless dark
pandemonium . He is an indomitable pessimist in the “devil city”. Though he
calls himself a journalist, he “ was still, the anonymous and shabby clerk on a
newspaper, calling himself a journalist, for that is a fine, crisp and jaunty
word. But the dismal truth was that all he did was cut long strips of newspaper
and paste and file them, occasionally venturing out to verify a dull fact in
some airless office room.” (8) Nirode feels that it is impossible to work under
any man, by his orders, at a stipulated time, at a meaningless job. He loathes
the superciliousness, their arrogance and their blindness in following a
mundane senseless job. He feels that it is ridiculous to spend their entire
energy, lives and intelligence on “something that does not matter”(18) He believes
that it is better not to live at all rather than to live a life of
meaningless. He says, ” Better to leap out of the window and end it all instead
of smearing this endless sticky glue of senselessness over the world. Better
not to live.” (18)
According to Nirode, he should live a sensible life
by indulging in a sensible work or otherwise he should not live at all. He
regrets that he has not begun his life yet. He aspires to become a writer and
all that he wants, he says, decisively are “three drinks a night and a room of
his own ... three drinks for inspiration… and a room in which to write
in!”(11). Though ‘three drinks and a room’ seems like a princedom, he is
determined to get it.
Though he has reminiscences of his childhood and of
his mother at Kalimpong, he recalls with disgust his mother’s attraction for
their neighbor, the flirtatious Major Chadha, which he believes has deprived
him of his mother’s love towards him. When he reads the letters from his
mother, he expresses such resentment about his mother mentioning Major Chadha’s
name “ how unashamedly she wrote the hideous name, so like a cooking pot full
of yellow food, or a rag of dirty underwear. How helpful was this Chadha,
providing her with male company and admiration.”(37) Nirode
feels that even marriage is destructive, negative and decadent. His view
on marriage after meeting Sarla is that it is heinous. He wants to escape from
the journey which allures David so much. There is no hope about anything or any
companionship in his life. He feels even
education is all rot .He finds no compatibility or comfort with any body except
the respect he holds for the painter Dharma and his Irish iterant Davis.
Strangely, Nirode is in pursuit of failure while the
whole world runs behind material success and fame. He wants to fail
irresistibly and quickly. He want the magazine to fail quickly. To him failure
should be quick, descending should be quick. His wish is to see the depth of
failure quickly even before he climbs the ladder of success.
…
I want it to fail –quickly. Then I want to see if I have the spirit to start
moving again, towards my next failure. I want to move from failure to failure
to failure, step by step to rock bottom. I want to explore that depth. When you
climb a ladder, all you find at the top is space, all you can do is leap
off—fall to the bottom. I want to get there without that meaningless
climbing. I want to descend,
quickly.(40)
Though he aspired to be a writer , though he
succeeded in his venture of the magazine Voice,
he is neither contented nor proud
about his success. He wanted to get rid of the magazine . He wanted to avoid
it. Dharma’s sarcasm and disapproval
might have aggravated his wish to get rid of the responsibility of running the
magazine, “ the magazine tasted now to him—artificial and a waste. The fact
that his friends so believed in it, so encouraged it, made him despise them all
the more. Yet he was responsible for it . He hated this being responsible for
anything at all.”(72)
He informs David that he does not
want to wait for the failure of the
magazine.
As
the angry young man of John Osborne , Nirode is also angry and frustrated about
the society. He articulates that the society is responsible for the
individual’s failure.The society should feel guilty for every individual’s
failure in this world. “Society must have some kind of guilt complex about us
after all.” (59) Hence he hates the world. “He loathes the world that could
offer him no crusade, no pilgrimage and he loathed himself for not having the
true, unwavering spirit of either within him.”(64)
His habit of withdrawal, withdrawal of love and resistance had grown stronger that he is
not willing to accept love. He is prideful and does not wish to submit or
commit himself to any sort of bondage. He feels these attachments to life an entrapment,
a mesh . Though he lives in a miserable state , he still wishes to be
economically independent . He suffers from such contempt on his mother that he
refuses to sign the forms when his mother is willing to open a bank account in
Nirode’s name. He says,” Tell her I want no share of it , no share of banks or
finance or insurance and all the rest of her bleeding equipment. Tell her
she’ll never get me to sign my name or fill in a form… I’m done with signing my
name, believing my name,or having a name. Tell her, I’m nameless. Tell her
that.”(134)
When
the whole world aspires and perspires to achieve success, every individual
wants to become a name and desires to
hold some kind of responsibility, Nirode
on the contrary wants to fail, becomes nameless and hates to be
responsible for anything.
Desai’s
characters are manifested with the traits of introspection, introversion, incompatibility
and inability to compromise makes them lead
a life of isolation. His characters are not flat and they change, permeate and
grow psychologically under the stream-of – consciousness. Very few writers have
surpassed Desai in the demarcation and delineation of the protagonist. Her interest in the psychic life of mankind has made her explore the unexplored
arenas of human mind. The chaotic, conflicting and the profound struggle in the
inner recesses of human beings makes her a distinctive novelist. Her novels are
introspective and try to trace the workings of the mind in their struggle
against the odds of the social and emotional world.
