Voices of Memory and Identity: Lyrical Storytelling in Selected Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai

Abstract

This paper examines how Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) use lyrical, non-linear storytelling to render memory as the primary vehicle of individual and collective identity. Both novelists depart from conventional realist chronology, instead building their narratives out of recurring images, fragmented timelines, and richly sensory language that mimic the workings of memory itself. Reading the two novels through the lenses of trauma theory (Caruth, Herman), collective memory (Halbwachs), and postcolonial diaspora studies (Bhabha, Hua), this paper argues that lyricism in Roy and Desai is not ornamental but structural: it is the formal means by which colonial history, caste violence, migration, and personal loss are encoded into character and narrative. The paper further argues that while Roy's lyricism circles obsessively around a single traumatic day to expose the machinery of caste and family repression in Kerala, Desai's lyricism disperses across continents and generations to map the fractures of diasporic belonging. Together, the two novels demonstrate that in postcolonial Indian English fiction, poetic narrative form and the politics of identity are inseparable.