The Novels of Arun Joshi: A Critical Study

The present book is an addition to the study of Arun Joshi’s novels in the context of the theme of the crisis of identity in the post-modern world in the wake of colonial hangover, economic depression, psychological split-up as well as existential angst and freedom of choice. The major characters in Joshi’s novels find themselves in a predicament from which they find it difficult to get disentangled. The one world is dead and the other powerless to be born. The worldly affluence is not enough. The escape from the outer world to the inner keeps one engaged. Bred on the Western literary and philosophical obsession in Camus, Sartre, Malamud, and other American novelists, Joshi finds it a fashionable craze to write about the crisis of identity almost in the same vein in which the seventeenth century English authors posed to be melancholy.