Write an essay that considers the legacies of British colonialism within Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. You are free to write on any specific aspect related to this topic (such as the role of English or whiteness within the novel, for example) as long you formulate an original argument about the text and demonstrate your argument through textual evidence (that is, through quotes from the novel). Your essay should not reproduce an argument that has already been made in another essay or that someone else has already formulated in class. The argument should be entirely your own.
Additional Guidelines for Topic 1 and Topic 2:
Before you get started:
1. As you read the novel, highlight quotes that relate to the topic you intend to explore in your essay.
2. Type out these quotes on a separate document and organise them thematically. Now analyse your quotes closely: What do these quotes show? Doing this will help you navigate the text more easily and formulate a strong argument. Your argument should derive organically from a careful reading of the novel and close analysis of your specific quotes.
3. From your list of quotes, highlight the quotes that you intend to use in your paper. Pick the quotes that best demonstrate your argument.
4. Create an outline of your essay. Decide in advance what examples (quotes) you will be using in each paragraph. This will help with clarity and organization.
This is how you should structure your introduction:
1. Get right into the novel and start laying the ground for your argument, so that by the time readers get to your argument, they can already see its importance. Leave out any generalizations, especially generalizations about history or “the world we live in.” Do not provide a summary of the novel. The introduction should immediately focus on the specific aspect within the novel that you will examine in the paper.
2. State your argument in a clear thesis statement. Start the thesis statement with “I argue…” Make sure that the argument is about the book or any aspect of the book (and not about “society” or “India,” for example).
3. Provide a roadmap of your paper; that is, in just one or two sentences, briefly explain how you will proceed to demonstrate your argument in the paragraphs that follow.
Your paper overall should be structured as follows:
1. Introduction with a clear thesis statement.
2. Paragraph that demonstrates one aspect of your argument and includes at least one short quote from the novel that provides evidence for your claims.
3. Paragraph that demonstrates one aspect of your argument and includes at least one short quote from the novel that provides evidence for your claims.
4. (And so forth… depending on how many paragraphs you need).
5. Conclusion Here, you should answer the questions: Why does your argument matter for the sake of interpreting The God of Small Things? What do we miss about the novel if we fail to consider what you just considered in your essay?
Analysis:
– Remember that you are writing an argumentative paper. This means that the goal of your essay is to demonstrate your argument through evidence. Hence, each main paragraph (except for the introduction and conclusion) should focus precisely on demonstrating your argument. What does not demonstrate your argument does not belong in the main body of the paper. Avoid summarizing the novel and making generalisations that are not supported through evidence.
– You need textual evidence (that is: quotes from the novel) and an analysis of your textual evidence grounded in close reading to ensure that your reader will accept your interpretation of the text. Regardless of which issue, theme, character, motif, image, or literary strategy you examine in the paper, you need to be able to trace this throughout the whole book. Your evidence/examples then should come from different parts of the novel, and not just from a short section of the text.
– You do not need to use secondary sources for this paper. In fact, using secondary sources is not encouraged since, for this specific paper, I would like you to practice grappling with a novel on your own. However, if you do use secondary sources, make sure you cite them and avoid plagiarising. Remember that you should always provide your own textual evidence and analysis. Do not just repeat what other scholars have already written, but rather build upon, disagree with, or challenge other scholars. Trust your own reading of the text!
– When you refer to the text, cite the page number in brackets at the end of the sentence. Do this regardless of whether you paraphrase the text or quote it directly. Example: (Roy, 10).
– Except for the introduction and conclusion, each paragraph in your essay should include at least one (short) quote from the text. At the same time, you should not fill your paper with unnecessary quotes. Feel free to omit parts within a quote if the whole passage is not necessary to demonstrate your argument. Example: “Two weeks later, Estha was Returned. . . . Estha and Rahel hadn’t seen each other since” (Roy, 5).
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