Voice, Violence, and Visibility: Narrative Tensions in the Novels of Aravind Adiga

Abstract

This article analyzes Aravind Adiga's narrative techniques in terms of voice, violence, and visibility in his most prominent novels—The White Tiger (2008), Last Man in Tower (2011), Selection Day (2016), and Amnesty (2020). Adiga's fiction is traditionally read as social critique; yet, this work contends that his novels unveil deeper narrative tensions in which voice as a site of agency, violence as literal and structural force, and visibility as negotiating between the poles of recognition and erasure. By close reading, this paper examines how Adiga assigns narrative agency to subaltern figures, dramatizes the encounter of violence and survival, and underscores the fragile visibility of the subaltern subject in a globalized capitalist world. Drawing on theoretical insights from postcolonial studies, narratology, and ethics (Spivak, Agamben, Bhabha), the paper argues that Adiga's novels are not only portraying India's inequities but also dramatizing the struggle of narration. His figures contain contradictions: to speak is to betray, to be silent is to disappear; to be seen is to be under observation, but not to be seen means to be erased. Through exploring these contradictions, the study places Adiga's writing at once realist and allegorical, local and global, ethical and political. Finally, the present paper contends that Adiga's fiction is a narrative ethics of precarity—where narrative becomes inextricable from the struggles over power, violence, and recognition.