Interpreter of Maladies Tone

Elegiac, Matter-of-Fact, Wonderment

Elegiac, or "You can't always get what you want"

Prepare a box of Kleenex because, even though there are nine different narrators in the book, they all have—at some point—a mournful quality to their narration. That's because everyone seems to encounter some kind of grievous loss.

The first story actually ends with weeping: "They wept together, for the things they now knew" (ATM 104). Notice, by the way, that this story ends much the same way that "Mrs. Sen's" ends, with a narrator who observes—at middling distance—the sadness of the whole situation.

Eliot, for instance, "looked out the kitchen window, at gray waves receding from the shore, and said that he was fine" (MS 129). The "gray waves" from this story and the weeping from "A Temporary Matter" show us that these characters are definitely not "fine."

The narrators of most of the stories (especially the first one) are getting you to lower your expectations for happiness, not just in these stories, but for life in general. Marriages end, parents neglect us, children die, and families are separated. Somehow, through all this, Lahiri keeps us reading.

Matter-of-Fact, or "Hey, that's life"

You know how Boori Ma just gets tossed out of her building and no one cares? Well, the only person who might isn't even a person; it's the narrator. And in this case, "care" might be too strong a word because the narrator really isn't in the business of feeling.

The narrator's just observing, from a distance, what happens to Boori Ma at the end: "So the residents tossed her bucket and rags, her baskets and reed broom, down the stairwell, past the letter boxes, through the collapsible gate, and into the alley. Then they tossed out Boori Ma" (ARD 75).

Notice the "so" and the "then"? It's as if what happens to Boori Ma is just a part of a logical, linear chain of events. One thing happens and then another thing happens after that. It's a tragic and shocking ending told in a very detached way.

That's pretty much the same tone as the narration in "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar." But in that story, Bibi manages to make the chain of events work in her favor. The collective "we" narrators create this tone because they focus on the practical steps Bibi and the community take to help Bibi and her son survive:

Within a month Bibi had recuperated from the birth, and with the money that Haldar had left her, she had the storage room white-washed, and placed padlocks on the window and doors. Then she dusted the shelves and arranged the leftover potions and lotions, selling Haldar's old inventory at half price. She told us tospread word of the sale, and we did. (TBH 52)

The passage goes on, but you get the point. Bibi and the community take whatever steps necessary, one after another.

Wonderment, or "Isn't life grand?"

You know how you feel when you stare at something huge, like the Grand Canyon or the Niagara Falls? Like the world is so much larger and amazing than you could ever imagine?

That's the feeling you get in the more uplifting moments in Interpreter of Maladies, especially the ending to the last one: "Still there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination" (TFC 151).

The narrator is full of wonder at experiencing so much of the world, step by step, meal by meal, person by person. Notice all the "each"s? They show how much can be accomplished through small, individual ventures.

And here's Miranda at the end of "Sexy": "The Mapparium was closed, but she bought a cup of coffee nearby and sat on one of the benches in the plaza outside the church, gazing at its giant pillars and its massive dome, and at the clear-blue sky spread over the city" (S 190).

Maybe moments like this are what keep us reading in the face of some seriously bleak stories in the collection—and, by extension, what keep us going in the face of the bleak moments in life.