Fasting, Feasting Literary Elements

Fiction

The setting of the novel is in a small Indian town and a Massachusetts suburb in the 1970s.

The narrator is third-person omniscient.

Tone: placid, melancholy, earnest, anxious

Mood: dreamy, moody, stressed, lonely

Protagonists: Uma, Arun. Antagonists: Mama, Papa, Mr. Patton.

Will Uma be able to eke out any sort of life for herself as an unmarried woman living with her parents?
Will Arun survive his hellish summer in the suburbs of America, and ever feel like he fits in or has any idea of who he is?

The family learns Anamika is dead, whether by suicide or murder.

1. The difficulty Arun has meeting basic benchmarks as a baby foreshadows his disappointing qualities later in life, such as his being sickly and being a vegetarian.

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1. There are numerous allusions to the period of British colonialism, such as the presence of convent schools and other aspects of Christianity, cricket, the English language, etc.
2. Lord Krishna is the eighth incarnation of Vishnu; Shiva is one of the main deities in the Hindu pantheon.
3. The Ramayana is an important ancient Indian epic, one of the parts of the Mahabharata.
4. "Colonel Bogey," also called the "River Kwai March" for its use in that famous 1957 film, is a 1914 British march, usually whistled.
5. Arun likes Captain Marvel, Superman, and Phantom, all American comic book heroes.
6. "Away in a Manger" and "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" are famous Christmas carols.

The imagery in the second section, when Arun is in America, is all of abundance, excess, waste, and gluttony. Desai writes of sterile, gleaming supermarkets; bleeding, charred carcasses of meat on the suburban barbecues; freezers stocked with food, etc.—all in order to savagely comment on Americans equating "plenty" with success and contentment, and eating meat with callous barbarism.

There is also water imagery, such as the river in which Uma wants to submerge herself and seek oblivion, the river where Anamika's ashes are deposited, the swimming hole where Arun feels a modicum of peace and wholeness.

1. "As for Papa, he never became less like himself, only more so." (7)

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1. "Papa stands on the veranda steps watching [the car's] sagging, rusting body crawl forward with a grinding, reluctant groan." (11)
2. "the morning sun leapt up in the hazy, sand-coloured sky and struck the boat." (122)
3. "Anamika—had marriage devoured her?" (134)
4. "In such profusion, the houses seem as lost, as stranded, as they might have been when this was primeval forest." (159)