Poetic Trauma

Liana Meffert

Eng 345W

4/23/2015

The God of Small Things: An Exploration of Emotional Trauma

Through Poetic Device

In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy explicates character emotions such as fear, depression, rumination, and guilt when confronted with traumatic events. Twins Rahel and Estha experience a series of inter-connected traumas, including the drowning of their eight-year-old cousin, Sophie Mol. Roy uses poetic devices to depict the twins’ emotional response to these traumas. In the DSM V, four distinct symptoms characterize PTSD: “re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions, mood and arousal”(1). Poetic devices such as simile, personification, idiosyncratic capitalization, and repetition communicate many of these symptoms. Devices convey the twins’ approach to processing trauma and grief, and the extent to which childhood trauma influences their adulthood. A large tragedy in the novel is Sophie’s drowning, for which Rahel and Estha feel partially

She convinces the twins that their mother will be imprisoned unless they confess. With Estha’s incrimination of Velutha: “Childhood tiptoed out. /Silence slid in like a bolt”(303). In extreme childhood trauma such as Estha’s, young children may refuse, or forget, how to talk. The “physical” departure of Estha’s childhood creates a bifurcation between child-Estha and the Estha who has been traumatized. Estha’s grief becomes a burden he carries: “—he carried inside him the memory of a young man with an old man’s mouth. The memory of a swollen face and a smashed, upside-down smile…It was lodged there, deep inside some fold or furrow, like a mango hair between molars. That couldn’t be worried loose”(32). Describing the mango hair as something that could not be worried loose underlines the finality and helplessness he