“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy: Protagonists are twins (multiple personality metaphor), one of whom has an alternate personality

I have just begun this Booker Prize-winning novel, and my rushing into an interpretation risks looking foolish later, but I don’t want forget this opening:

Rahel and Estha, sister and brother, are fraternal twins. They “thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities” (1, pp. 4-5).

However, the twins are separated for most of the years between ages seven and thirty-one.

At one point during these years, Rahel (who becomes an architect, like the author) gets married. And when she and her husband make love, “he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window…” (1, p. 20).

The spirit inhabiting Rahel and looking out through her eyes is referred to as “Small God,” because it is related to personal difficulties (as opposed to Big God spirits, related to national difficulties).

“So Small God laughed a hollow laugh…The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression…not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha’s words had been. He [Rahel’s husband] couldn’t be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies” (1, pp. 20-21).

Rahel was possessed by a Small God spirit, who was filling the emptiness in Rahel caused by her separation from her twin brother. Spirit possession, from a psychological perspective, is multiple personality. And it is a male alternate personality (opposite-sex alters are common in multiple personality).

A male alternate personality is consistent with the behavioral problems that Rahel had had at school: “It was…as though she didn’t know how to be a girl” (1, p. 18).

In short, it appears that the title of this novel refers to spirit possession or multiple personality. But, so far, there is no indication that the narrator thinks of it in the latter, psychological terms.

1. Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things [1997]. New York, Random House, 2008.