Interpretation Of The "Echo" In E. M. Forster's A Passage To India

A Passage to India is an Indian subject novel of E. M. Forster. The novel reveals the contradiction and the gulf between the two nations of the British and the Indians in the period of Raj by displaying the experiences or encounters of two English newcomers in India-Mrs. Moore and Miss Adela Quested, along with the aftermath of the cave incident. The "echo" is mentioned several times in the novel. Among all the echoes, three of them are of greatest significance:the echo that is heard by Mrs. Moore in the cave, the echo that is heard by Adela in the cave, and the echo that is remarked by Fielding as a metaphor. Since hearing the echo, Mrs. Moore has sunk in a state of apathy; when Adela hears the echo, she has the hallucination of being insulted in the cave by the Indian young man Dr. Aziz; in the sight of Fielding, the whole India seems to be effected by the echo. Each one of the echoes mentioned above is not merely a reflected common sound here but is endowed with some special meaning or a certain function.Through delving into the text and referring to the historical background and Indian matters in the period of Raj, the thesis makes a detailed interpretation of the three kinds of echoes in three chapters, with such various analytic aspects as religion, intellect, and national relation, with the purpose of illustrating the effects of the echoes, exploring the reasons to cause such effects, and revealing their implied meanings.Through detailed and comprehensive analysis of the echoes, the views of the thesis can be summed up as follows:the echo heard by Mrs. Moore changes her Christian Love into apathy, which indicates Mrs. Moore's Christian-belief crisis, namely, the fate for the Christianity to be impacted; the echo heard by Adela disturbed her intellectual-sense, which indicates her intellectual-quest crisis, that is to say, the fate for the logical understanding of India to be frustrated; the echo as a metaphor is compared to a destructive power that causes the hostility and gulf between the British and the Indians, and it indicates the British-Indian connection crisis, in other words, the predicament for the intimate intercourse or the friendship between two nations of the British and the Indians.