Reading the Language of Children in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

Language is considered to be more than a mere means of communication by the postcolonial critics. Language holds a person’s understanding of the world as well as reveals the inner workings of that person. This paper takes Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as a sample of this postcolonial trait of language. Roy uses language to open the windows of her child protagonists’ minds. A close reading of the text enables the researcher to appreciate the use of children’s language in this text to understand their innocent world and also how they see the experienced world of the adults