The Original Sin in The God of Small Things

Summary
In that enchanted jungle, a divorced, upper-class mother of two children made love with an untouchable Paravan transgressing the boundaries of morality and breaking the law as to who should be loved, how and how much. The God of Small Things, like any masterpiece of literature, has been subjected to myriad interpretations and yet promises more to its readers every time it’s taken off the shelf. This paper seeks to study this maiden work of fiction by Arundhati Roy as a parable of the original sin depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Like the biblical tale of man’s first disobedience, Roy’s fiction also acquaints the readers with characters who disobey the perennial ‘love laws’ and suffer …show more content…
The novel has been endeared both by literary critics and lay readers positioning Roy as a literary genius, after which she has sauntered to political activism. Critics have analyzed the book from multiple dimensions highlighting feminism, dalit aesthetics, non-sequential narratology, stylistics, neologism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, eco-criticism and so on. The novel also bears a clear imprint of the biblical “original sin” which will be my contention …show more content…
One might find the reference to the genesis. Because these laws made grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles and jelly jelly. The laws not only regulate the world but have also created it. Laws are therefore the pseudonym of God. In perfect accordance to these laws, Mamachi finds no problem if Chacko brings women to satisfy his “man’s needs”.

In Paradise Lost, Satan’s is caught during his first infiltration to Eden. Satan, however manages to tempt Eve in a dream. Perturbed by the dream, Eve relates the obscure details to Adam and is resolved not to commit the sin. In the titular chapter titled “God of Small Things”, Ammu too has seen smoky visions of her making love with an one-armed man. She wakes up and realizes the one-armed man was none other than Velutha himself. As a parallel to Eve’s narcissism when she beholds her own image in the water, Ammu too looks at her naked self in the bathroom mirror.
Hooded in her own hair, Ammu leaned against herself in the bathroom mirror and tried to weep…That afternoon-while in the bathroom the fates conspired to alter horribly the course of their mysterious mother’s read, while in Velutha’s backyard an old boat waited for them (Roy