Language of the Opening Lines of Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock

Abstract

The beginning of a novel is generally said to express the whole gamut of emotions. Particular point of attention of almost all fiction writings is the beginning of novel since this is what makes the readers decide to read the whole of it or to stop reading in the very beginning. At this point, the novelist has to make the reader’s imagination go with the writer’s, and has to make a smooth transaction of the reader’s emotions towards the thematic flow of the novel. This is all done by choices: which words to select, where, when and in what order and so on to transcend the reader from the real world to the intended imaginary world. Hence, lexical and structural analysis of the beginning of a novel may certainly help a researcher open the gateway of better interpretation and relate the meaning with the general impressionist observations and comments about the novel. This paper, with the help of Leech and Short’s (2007: 61-67) model of stylistic analysis, examines the language and style of the opening lines of Anita Desai Desai’s Cry, the Peacock(1963), and tries to establish the connection between the language use in the analysed texts and the theme-rheme of the novels