| Since1997’s publication, Indian author Arundhati Roy’s first and so far the only English novel The God of Small Things has awarded the National Book Award and the Booker Prize. It has been the global best-seller and on the list of some universities’course as one of the modern classics attracting academic attention and research. This Thesis aims to analyze The God of Small Things by placing it into the framework of Gayatri C. Spivak’s Subaltern theory from the cultural perspective. It tries to focus on the social context colonialism, caste and gender to dig out different subalterns’voicelessness and the representation of their subjectivity.Spivak’s subaltern theory enlarges the conception of the subaltern including all those oppressed and subordinated groups excluded from the mainstream culture. She puts forward subaltern can not speak and they have the heterogeneity which queries former research form and pays more attention to the social power relationship such as class, gender, nationality and so on which are hidden behind the language. It strategically represents subaltern’s subjectivity under the concrete social context and experience in order to clear out the space for subaltern to speak and be heard.Based on Spivak’s subaltern theory, this thesis tries to analyze Indian subaltern’s marginalized and covered situation, and forming reasons from four obvious and influent social contexts-British colonialism, internal colonialism, caste and gender. It aims to uncover the elimination and replacement of subaltern’s voice and how the novel strategically represents subaltern’s subjectivity and heterogeneity, which gives a new way to reconstruct subaltern’s subjectivity.The author and the novel both are the practice of the subaltern’s theory. As an organic intellectual, Roy strategically represents subaltern’s living condition and voicelessness in the post-colonial country nowadays. She advocates democracy and equality which highlights attention to the subaltern’s condition. |
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