Remembrance of Homes Past: The Narration of Memory in Baumgartner's Bombay, The Bus Stopped and The God of Small Things

Abstract

This thesis explores how the concept of memory unfolds through the narration of memories, and how the threefold relationship; memory, the remembered and the one remembering, is given narrative form. In this thesis I am concerned with how the three novels Baumgartner's Bombay by Anita Desai, The Bus Stopped by Tabish Khair, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy render the process and experience of remembering. In my readings these novels portray the complexities and discrepancies of remembrance, faulty perception, our relation to home and our origins, and they put into fictional form the power the past holds over the present. The wider implications of this are connected to historical wounds and collective trauma.