Motif: The Future
Ghosh often writes about the future in this text, showing how our actions today will impact our descendants. Yet he does not want us to think only about the far-off future—he wants us to think about the next few years, the next decade. He does not think "the future" as a concept for literature is useful because it is too remote from our lived experience.
Symbol: The Tiger
The tiger of the Sundarbans is the symbol of the uncanny, of the nonhuman—it is silent and implacable, menacing and discombobulating, familiar but also deeply strange. Ghosh uses it within his essay to allow us to understand what a human encounter with the nonhuman might feel like, and why it is important for us as we figure out how to deal with the Nature we have influenced so deleteriously.
Symbol: The Cyclone
For Ghosh, the cyclone he experiences in New Delhi is a symbol of the fantastic, the weird, the uncanny, the improbable. It becomes something he has to grapple with, trying to either make it normal or make it abnormal. He uses it to formulate his thoughts on why writers do not want to discuss climate change in their serious fiction, for it is a destabilizing, impossible, bizarre event.
Motif: The Uncanny
The concept of the "uncanny" appears again and again throughout the text. Ghosh uses this term in the traditional sense, referring to a psychological experience that is mysterious but also familiar and quite often frightening in its familiarity. For Ghosh, representations of the the uncanny are no longer in fashion for literary fiction novels, and have instead been relegated to the science fiction genre. Ghosh believes that this tendency of the modern novel to explore the "everyday" rather than the uncanny has contributed to the delay in addressing the climate crisis.
Motif: Self-Reflection
Throughout The Great Derangement, which is written in first person, Ghosh often showcases his own self-reflection for the reader as he wonders aloud how his own life has been shaped by the climate crisis and, crucially, what he himself has done to combat it. This self-reflection includes anecdotes from his past (including the one he found impossible to write about, the cyclone) as well as the admission that his own fiction has failed to address the climate crisis in the way he now encourages other writers to do.
