The Apprentice: Quest for Conscience -A True Reflection of Present Time

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The Apprentice (1974) probes deeper into the inner consciousness of individual with a view to explore, what the novelist calls, “that mysterious underworld” on one hand and on the other, he tries to focus on the decaying moral values in society. In this novel, he rendered in a confessional form a telling commentary on the decaying values of a degenerating civilization. It is a story of a young man who out of sheer exhaustion of joblessness and privation is forced to shed honesty and the old world morality of his father to become an ‘apprentice’ to the corrupt civilization. The Apprentice condemns materialistic values but in its own unique way. The novelist has used monologue and narration to a boy who is present throughout in just symbolical fashion. According to World Literature Today:
The novel is cast in a series of Browning –like monologues, to a boy to whom the protagonist ,burdened with sorrow of ‘wasted life’, lays bare the motives ,aspirations, dilemmas and frustrations of his past.
The protagonist in this novel is very simple man who comes to the city with lots of hope to get a good and respected job. Contrary to his expectations, in reality he has to face number of hardships to survive in the city .He is disillusioned in this course of job search. Gradually all his ideals, morals and enthusiasm wane and he started a life full of compromises. Ratan Rathore is a young man whose soul has two distinct aspects- the higher self and the lower self. All through the course of novel, his soul is torn by these conflicting pulls of lower and higher self, between idealism and realism. In fact he is the child of double inheritance. He has taken the patriotic and idealistic values from his father and worldly wisdom from his mother. H...

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...e quite wonderfully the writer has suggested that more and more money cannot fetch peace of mind and real happiness for us. In spite of all the luxuries and enjoyments in Bombay,Ratan is not happy. He feels an inner void:The more money I accumulated, the more I was dissatisfied and the more I was determined to “ enjoy” life. And all the time I thought of death. (Joshi 85) The novel commands the value of humility and self-purification. In this sense the novel is a study of the loss and retrieval of one’s soul. As he stated himself:

References:
Joshi,Arun:The Apprentice Delhi :Orient Paperbacks, 1993 Print
Prasad,Hari Mohan:Arun Joshi, Liverpool: Lucas Publication, 1985
Joshi,Arun:The Foreigner, Delhi :Orient Paperbacks, 1993
Joshi,Arun:The Strange case of Billy Biswas, New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2008
Joshi,Arun:The Last Labyrinth, Delhi :Orient Paperbacks, 1981

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