Building a Story: The Architecture of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

Abstract

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy (1997), is the story of two fraternal twins, Estha and Rahel, who grew up in Ayemenem in Kerala, India. The story, with two interspersed timelines, follows their lives from their childhood to when they return as adults, still deeply scarred by their past. This paper proclaims that the intricate complexity of Roy's novel derives from her training as an architect, which impels her to apply architectural principles to literary construction