R. K. Narayan

Question- Consider R. K. Narayan as a novelist.

Ans-
R. K. Narayan is regarded as one of the greatest of Indian novelists in English. He started his career as a novelist in 1935. His novels are - Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts (1936), The Dark Room (1938), The English Teacher (1945), Mr. Sampath (1949). The printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), The Man- eater of Malgudi, The Vendor of Sweets, The Printer of Signs, A Tiger for Malgudi, Talkative Man, The World of Natraj.
Narayan's gifts as a writer are out of the ordinary he wields so difficult and 'alien' a language like English with masterful ease, and conveys the subtlest shades of feelings and thought, unlike Anand he uses hardly any swear words at all, he does not exploit perversion or sex, and seldom brings in controversial politics. He is a master of comedy who is not unaware of the tragedy of the human situation. He is neither an intolerant critic of Indian ways and modes nor their funatic defender, he is, on the whole content to snap life's little ironies, knots of satire circumstance, and tragi-comedies of mischance and misdirection. At his best he can present smiles and tears together, smiling through the tears in things and glimpsing the rainbow magnificence of life.
In Narayan's novels, there is generally a flight, an uprooting, a disturbance of order-followed by a return, a renewal, a restoration of normalcy. No doubt Narayan seems to see the world as a mere balance of forces wrong doers and policemen keeping one another properly engaged, light and shadow endlessly chasing each other, hope and failure, forever playing a duet never to be concluded, but the 'soul' of Narayan's fiction is not this delicately self-adjusted mechanism of ironic comedy, but rather the miracle of transcendence and the renewal of life, love, beauty, peace. It may be said of Narayan's latest novels that amid all the small talk and crazed thoughts all the comic gestures and frantic movements, the miracle of faith enacting its own mysterious sun rise in minds darkened. and deadened by the galloping herds of the sickness of modern life. From In my beginning is my end' to 'In my end in my beginning' is a full circle indeed.
Narayan as a novelist is also a commentator on the broad tendencies of his society and age. He follows the tradition of story telling as it existed in ancient India, but adopts his form and style from the west. The instruments of his critical strategy are comedy, irony and satire. Narayan keeps very close to the surface reality, for his aim is to reveal the tragic comedy implicit in ordinary life. His problem is to give the reader a picture that strikes him as typical of everyday reality. For this, he depends on selection. He, therefore, excludes from his picture such aspects of reality as are not susceptible to comic treatment. His picture of life is always turn to facts, but to those facts only at which a reasonable being can be expected to simple. He is also careful to survey his subject matter from an angle from which its comic aspects are most prominently visible.
Narayan's prose style is simple. To him the writer is more important than his language. He writes like an old aristocrat who talks of the dignity and rules of a foreign game, plays foul, disregards its rule and justifies his "vidation" in the name of its indigeneous variety. No doubt Prof. Kantak accuses Narayan of a lack of amplitude, Yet the fact is that Narayan maintains the sublimity of effects. He is not the simplicity of a learned man or of a philosopher but of a man devoid of ostentation. His description of Rosie- Raju relationship and the cobra-dance in "The Guide" are poetic.
R. K. Narayan deals with the quaint essential irony of what man can make of himself and of the entire business of living. Whereas in the earlier novels he uses irony as a weapon, in his maturer works irony is used as vision. His fiction takes a giant leap from irony as weapon to irony as vision, from irony of the brief moment to irony of the great occasion, from ironic filigree to ironic architectonics, as a result of which his work gains in moral richness in three major novels - The Financial Expert', "The Guide', and 'The Man-eater of Malgudi'.
Narayan is essentially a humorous writer, interested in the lower middle classes of South India, in a world relatively free from the terrible privations and agonies, political conflicts and economic depression of Anand's India. It is hard to realise that Anand is writing about the some country. Yet in spite of their rich fantasy and comic caricature, Narayan's novels are a faithful reflection of an Indian as real as Anand's of Raja Rao's. The angle of vision determines the content and the atmosphere. Narayan sees South India as a fundamentally conservative Hindu society, changing under the impact of the West, industrialism, and modern ideas. Conservative India is seen with humour and some satire as a mixture of traditional holiness, with the comfort- loving sterility of the bourgeoise. Modern India is seen as an inevitable, but on the whole, inescapable phenomenon, compounded of external, political activism, permissive sexual, American popular culture and rapid half-lunatic violence. The secret of Narayan's art in his ability to keep these views in perfect balance. It makes him a subtle writer concealing irony, beneath a blandly simple exterion as a 'plain' storytellor.
Narayan's greatest contribution is humour. He has given indo-English literature what mark Twain gave to American literature. His humour is magnet that attracts every reader, a wind that sows the seeds of pleasantry, a light that brightens a thousand faces and refreshing cool showe of rains that kindles the drooping spirits of people and fills them with a promise of new life. In characterization in situations, in dialogues, in portraying the gulf that
exests between illusion and reality, in what is and what ought to be Narayan brings his humour in full play. He discovers something odd in what is ordinary, quaint and queer in what otherwise have been serious issues of life. His is the humour of the distorted mirror that exaggerates one or more of one's facial features-now nose, now eyes, now lips, diminishing others, and in the process create a picture funny to the child like pleasure seekers but noless meaningful to the adult imagination.

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