“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy (post 3): Key to interpretation is that central character is mutually-identified twins, essentially Rahel/Estha

The reader is told that for Rahel and Estha (fraternal twins), “there was no Each, no Other” (1, p. 215); they were essentially one person.

The only way that could be true would be if they were the alternate personalities of one person. But since the narrator has not labeled it as multiple personality, readers don’t think of it.

At the end of the novel, when the twins have sexual relations, most readers interpret it as a controversial cliff-hanger: Is incest permissible? What will happen in their relationship?

But it may be one more attempt by some personality on the novel’s writing committee to show the reader that Rahel and Estha are really one person: See, they are physically together! (That would be childish logic, but you have to remember that multiple personality begins in childhood, and some alternate personalities may have a child-like perspective.)

I know the idea that the central character is Rahel/Estha will seem far-fetched to most people. After all, the narrator also implies, quite often, that Rahel and Estha are two separate people. And when the author refers to her characters in interviews, she mentions them as two separate people.

But as Margaret Atwood (another Booker Prize winner) has said, you can never speak to the person who wrote the book you just read, because you will be speaking to the author’s regular personality, not their writing personality.

And if there are inconsistent views of the characters in the novel itself, that is probably because there were multiple personalities participating in the writing, and they sometimes differed.

Ultimately, however, the key to interpreting this novel is its choice to make the central character a pair of twins, who claim to be one person, psychologically. The choice to do that with the central character makes multiple personality the novel’s subtext.

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