Themes (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes
Themes
Themes represent the core ideas that run throughout a literary work, often reflecting universal human experiences and concerns. In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy weaves several interconnected themes that illuminate the social, emotional and political landscape of Kerala, India. Understanding these themes is essential for analysing how Roy constructs meaning in the novel and critiques social structures.
Themes in literature serve as the foundation for understanding a work's deeper meaning. In Roy's novel, these themes are deliberately interconnected, each one reinforcing and reflecting the others to create a complex portrait of social injustice and human longing.
Elusive love
Love in Roy's novel operates as something perpetually out of reach, much like the untouchable status of the Paravan caste. This parallel between love and untouchability is central to understanding the novel's treatment of forbidden relationships and social boundaries.
The novel demonstrates how love drives the plot's key events whilst remaining frustratingly incomplete. Ammu's relationship with Velutha serves as the primary example of this elusive quality. Their love transgresses caste boundaries, making it literally forbidden and dangerous. Similarly, love creates complex dynamics between other characters: it draws Ammu to sleep with Velutha despite the catastrophic consequences, it captivates and terrifies Rahel, and it creates Ammu's conflicted feelings towards Rahel as a child. The unfulfilled love between Ammu and her children, particularly the tragic betrayal of Velutha, shapes the emotional core of the narrative.
Ironically, the only character who experiences love openly in the novel is Sophie Mol, despite her brief appearance and tragic death. The Kochamma family's devotion to Sophie Mol, someone they barely know, contrasts sharply with their treatment of the twins. Her death becomes the ghostly centre around which the entire plot revolves, highlighting how love can be performative and selective.
Roy also explores how love becomes twisted and corrupted when mixed with violence and abuse. The novel presents disturbing examples of perverted affection: the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man's molestation of Estha, Mammachi enduring nightly violence from her husband Pappachi, Ammu's brutal treatment of her husband Babu, and the incestuous relationship between Estha and Rahel. These instances reveal how love in its purest form appears only briefly in the novel. Despite being the motivating force behind much of the action, genuine love receives explicit attention only in a single chapter near the end, emphasising its elusive nature throughout the narrative.
The struggle to maintain boundaries
Boundaries in the novel exist in both physical and symbolic forms, yet they prove constantly vulnerable to transgression. This theme connects directly to the caste system, social norms and the natural world's resistance to human-imposed order.
Nature as Boundary-Crosser
Nature frequently acts as the first boundary-crosser in the novel, refusing to respect human divisions and structures. Roy uses natural imagery to show how the small things constantly threaten to overwhelm the big things—a key metaphor in the novel.
Brick walls become covered with moss, turning green and losing their defining function. Electric poles disappear under climbing vines, whilst the Ayemenem house gradually succumbs to dirt, grime and insect invasion. Through these images, Roy suggests that nature persistently finds ways to move beyond and through human boundaries. This natural transgression serves as a reminder of the small things that constantly threaten to overwhelm the big things. Even Pappachi's prized moth specimen escapes proper classification, as scientists argue for years over how to categorise it officially.
The twins themselves struggle with boundaries of identity and individuality. As children, they find it difficult to classify themselves as separate beings since they share identical thoughts and experiences. They consider themselves one entity rather than two distinct individuals. Only as adults do Rahel and Estha become truly separate people, yet even then they defy social norms by sleeping together, crossing perhaps the most fundamental boundary of all.
The Human Cost of Boundary Maintenance
Characters throughout the novel attempt to maintain boundaries and social order, but their efforts often lead to betrayal of deeper values. Mammachi and Baby Kochamma represent those who try to uphold caste boundaries and social hierarchy, yet in doing so they betray love, honour and compassion. The caste system itself demands constant boundary maintenance, but the novel reveals the devastating human cost of such rigid social divisions.
Mammachi turns against Velutha after years of service to protect her family's social standing. Baby Kochamma betrays the twins to preserve her own position in the world.
Pride and shame
These twin emotions operate as powerful forces within the Kochamma family, driving characters to create false versions of reality to avoid confronting their own inadequacy or vulnerability. Roy demonstrates how pride and shame can result from emotional instability, providing a form of grounding or orientation in the world, even when that grounding proves destructive.
Pappachi exemplifies how pride functions in the novel. To maintain his sense of importance, he purchases a blue Plymouth automobile and drives it conspicuously around town to appear successful and respectable. His pride depends heavily on dominating his wife Mammachi and asserting his status as an Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa Institute in Delhi. However, when his son Chacko forces him to stop beating Mammachi, and when he fails to receive credit for discovering a new moth species, Pappachi loses both sources of pride. His heart literally breaks on a particular day when these losses converge, suggesting how deeply his identity relies on maintaining superior status.
Mammachi's pride manifests differently but proves equally significant. As a woman in a patriarchal society, her pride centres on her family's reputation and social standing. When circumstances force her to choose between love and pride, she consistently selects pride, even at tremendous personal cost. This choice ultimately leads her to turn against Velutha, someone who has served her family faithfully.
Other characters similarly use pride to shape perceptions and avoid reality. Comrade Pillai, despite his lower caste position, attempts to impress others by having his children recite literature and making references to Shakespearean plays. Baby Kochamma invokes Shakespeare to impress a child, revealing how even small gestures of pride matter to her. These characters shape-shift and perform to maintain a façade of adequacy, suggesting that readers might sympathise with their desperate attempts to cover inadequacy with pride.
The Destructive Power of Shame
Shame functions as the destructive inverse of pride, keeping characters trapped in cycles of silence and suffering. The emotion prevents Estha from revealing his abuse, as he fears losing his mother's love and being seen as unworthy. Pride and shame together motivate many of the novel's most devastating actions, particularly Baby Kochamma's betrayal of Velutha, Ammu and the twins.
These emotions prove to be the driving forces behind the novel's most tragic events, showing how the desire to avoid shame and maintain pride can lead individuals to betray everything they should hold dear.
Key Points to Remember:
- Love in the novel operates as something perpetually untouchable and elusive, often mixed with violence and perversion, with only brief moments of genuine connection
- Boundaries constantly face transgression from nature, individuals and social relationships, revealing the tension between small things and big things
- The caste system represents the ultimate boundary that characters struggle to maintain or transgress, with devastating consequences
- Pride and shame drive characters to betray their deepest values, creating false versions of reality to avoid confronting inadequacy
- These themes interconnect throughout the novel, showing how social structures, personal emotions and forbidden love create the tragic circumstances at the heart of Roy's narrative