The Ethics of Nostalgia in Arundhati Roy\u27s \u3cem\u3eThe God of Small Things\u3c/em\u3e

We can read Roy\u27s novel as an articulation of the necessity of questioning the nation\u27s representation of authority, bringing to light that which exists on its borders and margins, and ultimately demonstrating how this plurivocality disrupts the unity or hegemony of national discourse in order to reveal how a nation is perhaps located in its counter-narratives, its own irreducible differences (Bhabha, 301). More specifically, according to the terms of Benedict Anderson\u27s ubiquitously cited phrase, Roy is engaged in examining how India, like any nation, exists as an imagined community ; or rather, The God of Small Things explores how we imagine that community through competing forms of nostalgia, which construct national arid personal narratives of dispossession, displacement, and loss that are in direct conflict with each other