Trauma, Fragmentation and the Child’s Psyche in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) using the framework of trauma theory, with a special focus on how intergenerational trauma, emotional neglect, and social violence fragment the identities of the child characters—Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol. Drawing on some of the concepts of Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman, the present analysis foregrounds how familial discord, caste hierarchies, and patriarchal violence contribute to psychic disintegration in childhood. In this sense, twin protagonists and their cousin are portrayed as inheriting the unresolved wounds of their parents’ failures and society’s injustices. Notably, the fragmented form of the narrative works as a symbolic mirror to traumatic memory and lays bare how the children’s psyche is shaped by events they cannot fully comprehend or control. This is how this analysis establishes the larger impacts of oppressive social norms with respect to broken childhoods, where innocence is lost to the enduring consequences of abuse, neglect, and forbidden love, leaving lasting scars on the children.