E.M. Forster's Quest For Order In A Passage To India

Forster's A Passage to India has been recognized as a major work of British fiction. With the publication of this novel, critics and readers expressed their very mixed responses to it. Forster is a great writer, but at the same time an elusive writer.Forster asserts that the book is not really about politics, but it is the political aspect that caught the general public. By presenting two antithetically opposed social orders, several personal relationships and three major religions, the writer expresses his sense of disorder in a disordered and multifarious world. Man's quest for order, Forster implies, is doomed, for it stems from the writer's sustained perception that all order that man envisions or achieves is partial and temporary.Forster's sense of disorder is reflected in the structure of this novel. There is a dominant pattern consisting of expectation and disappointment that underlies the intellectual and political life of Forster's society. This pattern is embodied in the plot, the visionary descriptive passages, the dialogue, and the grammar, tone and rhythm of the individual sentences.Being a symbolic novel, the final meaning of this novel emerges from a group of symbolic metaphors. The final section seems to signify harmony and regeneration as the reconciliation of the opposites of the first and second sections, but the tone of this third part and the presentation of the ceremonies and of Professor Godbole frustrate our expectation.Forster's disillusion is often due to ambiguities within himself. As a writer from the western world, he is inevitably informed by the prevailing colonial ideology in the early period of the 20th century. However, despite his subconscious prejudice, he sympathizes with Indian people and sides with India.What makes Forster an especially valuable writer is, in my viewpoint, that he has addressed major political, social, and psychological problems in his works and has foreseen some of the major dilemmas of the 20th century. A Passage to India communicates no simple political message; rather it expands our vision of life by bringing East and West into a new and significant relationship.