50 pages • 1 hour read
Arundhati RoyThe God of Small Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Rahel Ipe
Like her mother, the tragic and doomed Ammu, seven-year-old Rahel Ipe is impetuous, romantic, and passionate. As a child, in her behavior, in her attitude, even in her dress, she is flamboyant and self-assertive. Her gaudy hairstyles, kitschy, red-tinted plastic sunglasses, joyous penchant for spontaneously dancing to her radio, restless curiosity, and fascination with noticing the small things—the beauty of the florescence of plants and weird insects around her home—all demonstrate Rahel’s independence and her instinctual dislike, even distrust, of authority. Within the claustrophobic confines of her native India’s culture and its long conservative tradition of rules governing and restricting behavior, Rahel stubbornly resists. Indeed, her most meaningful relationship other than with her twin brother is with the untouchable Velutha, who, unlike her family, treats her with gentle respect and an open and generous heart.
Because at least part of the novel is shared from Rahel’s perspective, she is the most immediate and the most sympathetic of the novel’s wide cast. She is a fraternal twin, and for most of her life, despite being physically separated from Estha, she believes she is psychologically and emotionally completed by her brother—that they are an integral part of each other, and that they can communicate without words and even share each other’s dreams. The horrific experiences over the Christmas holiday in 1969 destroy Rahel’s reckless spirit of adventure, risk-taking, and impulsiveness. She is separated from her brother and alienated from her doomed mother. For more than 20 years, she cannot find her way to authentic emotion. In school and in her marriage, she carefully maintains a moat around her heart. She drifts through a succession of schools, completes a degree in architecture that matters little to her, marries indifferently, and divorces indifferently.
Rahel's return to her Indian home is the tipping point that begins the novel. It is also Rahel who, in the reunion with her troubled brother, initiates the intimacy of their taboo sexual encounter, itself less a crude expression of carnal attraction and more a desperate reaching out to reanimate their moribund hearts from their too-long half-lives of guilt, grief, and despair.
Esthappen Ipe
In that handful of years after his mother leaves his abusive father and before the events of the Christmas holiday that destroy him, Estha is a goofy kid with a silly Elvis pompadour and a ridiculously flashy pair of pointy shoes. With abandon, he sings aloud to show tunes in a crowded movie theater, unable and unwilling to restrain his crazy energy. Quickly, however, his becomes a character shaped not by action but by reaction. After the movie theater molestation, he is a character in recoil, a hurt kid who seeks only to survive, not to engage. It is difficult to square the swaggering kid whose own family asks him to move in the theater with the morose and broken man the novel introduces in the opening chapters.
There is something fragile and vulnerable in this adult Estha. Shortly after Estha, now in his thirties, returns home after his long exile, during one of his meandering walks through the jungle tangles, he chances to see a bird, really a blurry shadow, cross overhead. He wonders at the viability of such a fragile thing: “To Estha—steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man—the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle” (27). He is a similarly muted miracle of grim survival. His character is defined by three events that happen to him not because of him, and all within 72 hours. First, he is molested by the man peddling snacks at the movie theater. Then Estha is involved in the fluke accident when a floating log upends the tiny wooden boat where he and his sister and his cousin are just beginning their grand adventure. Then he is compelled, by the cruel machinations of his malevolent great-aunt, to be complicit in an elaborate lie to police that dooms Velutha, the only adult he and his sister have ever befriended, the only adult ever kind to him. At the age of seven, then, he learns two lessons that shape a life of lost promises, paranoia, loneliness, and fear: Everything can change in a day, so be prepared. The irony of the lesson—prepare for what you cannot prepare for—suggests why Estha matures into a melancholic character, unwilling to trust, unable to connect, seldom talking, and given to long walks. It is a miracle that he has survived. Only the powerful emotional reunion with his twin sister and their taboo sexual encounter promises to reanimate his shattered spirit.
Ammu
Ammu, the mother of the twins Rahel and Estha and the aunt of the doomed Sophie, is a passionate and free-spirited woman with the misfortune of being born into a mid-20th-century conservative Indian patriarchal culture that did not accord women the right to be either. That is the essence of her triumph and her tragedy. The narrator says that Ammu combined the “infinite tenderness of motherhood” with the “reckless rage of a suicide bomber” (72).
Determined not to allow the oppressive family construct in Ayemenem to limit her life, she flees the restrictive environment of her home (her mother was routinely abused verbally and physically by her dour and melancholy father, a frustrated academic). Naïve and reckless, she heads for the promise of life in the big city. She marries too quickly and discovers the man she thought she loved is angry and a drunk. Threatened with a loss of employment, her husband actually tries to negotiate the beautiful Ammu into a sexual relationship with his boss. That degradation—that cheapening of the sexual energy she so prizes—is sufficient for Ammu to leave him. When Ammu returns home with her twins, freed from that threatening and humiliating environment, her family callously stigmatizes her for her failed marriage. She struggles to be a single parent, the twins a reminder of the emotional burden she carries, a deadweight that prevents her from finding the love, the passion, and the life for which she yearns. She has no friends. Her family shuns her. She has only her deep response to the power of the music she plays on the family’s battered transistor radio.
The affair with the Black carpenter Velutha both defies and transcends her culture’s ancient caste system. Velutha is defined by his culture as an untouchable, the lowest of the low, unfit for anything but manual labor and marriage and joyless procreation with other untouchables to continue the drone class. However, when Ammu sees him stripped to his waist, she feels the tectonic stirrings of a passion that transcends the artificial racist boundaries of her culture. Her clandestine two-week affair is her release from a long life of denial and abstinence, the expression of her wild and dangerous passion. The novel closes with a detailed account of their incendiary coupling, how Velutha’s barest touch turned Ammu’s writhing body into flame and smoke. Her desperate efforts to save her lover from the police, however, define her spiral into tragedy. When Ammu’s own calculating and conniving aunt masterminds her exile from her home and children, Ammu’s tragedy is complete. She dies bitter, empty, and alone.
Velutha Paapen
Although centering a novel as deliberately fragmented as The God of Small Things risks simplifying a novel defined by its narrative densities, Velutha, the good-natured carpenter and accomplished and skilled handyman for the family’s pickle factory, serves as the novel’s moral center. Ironically, he is a Paravan, a socio-economic class that makes him, as a Black man, by definition an untouchable. Although the children are enchanted by his approachability, his wit, and his unaffected warmth, he is for the most part shunned by other factory workers, and despite performing a wide range of services—he is indispensable for the operations of the business and around the Ipe home—he is paid much less. Indeed, although Velutha gives up much of his time to caring for his disabled brother, Velutha’s own father will betray him to Ammu’s family.
Unlike the other characters, Velutha is not driven by greed, hate, paranoia, or power. He is driven rather by his unaffected, unironic love of the small things. The narrator dubs him the God of Small Things. He relishes beautiful bugs, a steady rain, a smoldering kiss, an afternoon of silly dancing and play, a stack of fried powdery vadas. When he plays with the children, he gives his time happily, even letting Rahel paint his fingernails a bright red. Despite being denied public education because of his status, Velutha is an autodidact, aware of the promise of the Communist party he joins to bring equality and dignity to the workers in the factory.
Velutha’s defining characteristic, in his dealings with the family, his negotiations with the factory administration, and his torrid affair with Ammu, is his fierce and unshakeable heart. He refuses to accept his inferiority. His father, who in the end turns on him, sees this and fears for him:
Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel (73).
As he waits each night for his lover Ammu to come to him, he revels in the excitement, feeling for the first time a connection to another. That connection triggers the sequence of events responsible for the fall of the Ipe family. In police custody, helpless and handcuffed, he is beaten to death as an expression of an entrenched, and outdated, racist social system. Ironically, the novel gifts an untouchable with the most profound sense of humanity, compassion, and love, at once a tragic hero and a moral exemplum.
