The rise of the modern novel marked a shift away from description in favor of narrative elements such as the plot. The paradigm shift, while crucial, undermined the critical role description plays in construction of the novel. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006)-- an often popular text for postcolonial discourse, has enjoyed underwhelming attention in terms of narratological practices. Hence, this paper examines the relationship between the mundane descriptions and scale to illuminate the novel’s exploration of the local class divide and global diasporic aspirations. It uses the descriptive practices that provide narrative space to the character of the Cook, and his son Biju, an undocumented migrant in New York– to regulate and exhibit the scale of their physical and social boundaries.

The analysis applies Dora Zhang’s theory of description’s unassuming political power of foregrounding literary fragments over the text as a whole. The paper also employs close reading strategies (like Erich Auerbach’s) to relationally connect the microscale (descriptions of everyday life) and the macroscale (socio-postcolonial framework). This paper, using these narratological frameworks, argues that mundane descriptions in The Inheritance of Loss, help negotiate the novel’s social and spatial scale by moving between the local and the global. It also ambitiously purports that the narratives of the marginalised can be illuminated through marginalised narratological elements like description.

Authors:
Sanchita Sahoo, West Virginia University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Sanchita Sahoo is currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts (fiction) at West Virginia University. Currently working on my thesis developing a short story collection exploring South-Asian slice-of-life narratives.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanwriting/

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