|
|
|
|
Articles: Literature | A Man of No Consequence
- Dr. Rajeshwar Mittapalli
| |
Like Subbaiah, the other important male characters of the novel too had gone through traumatic experiences early in their lives. For example, Venkat Rao was robbed of whatever material wealth he could have inherited from his spendthrift father by his own maternal uncle and a long-standing employee of his zamindari household, and Gavaraiah suffered the ignominy of his wife cheating on him. These experiences, devastating as they are, instead of psychologically destabilizing these two men, only transformed them into hardened individuals. Subbaiah’s experiences, naïve by comparison, have made him only a weakling and psychological wreck.
There is thus certainly something innate, and something very ‘Indian’ in him that has subjected him to inferiority complex and made him the man he is—shy and submissive, weak and wavering, insecure and indecisive, timid and compliant, perennially plagued by doubts and fears, and generally lacking in initiative and drive.
Subbaiah is never completely relieved of his complex while it should be so in a textbook case of inferiority complex, on gaining knowledge of the underlying causes. He is not a wiser man for having gone through the recent traumatic experience either. He is intellectually and culturally too ill equipped to derive any benefit from it. For that reason, and for several other reasons, his creator Ra.Vi.Sastri himself finds it difficult to like him. He explains in the epilogue to the novel:
While writing the final parts of the novel I felt only disgust for Subbaiah. … I was confirmed in the belief that he was an out and out worthless nincompoop.
| Be first to comment on this Article!
| |
|
|
|
 |
| Advertisements |
|
|
|
|
| Advertisements |
|
