A Story-Teller's World

R.K. Narayan in his book A Story-Teller's World writes about his own world, his role as a story-teller in Indian society, the nature of that society, the life of the people, and the way the story-teller takes the details of that world and transforms them through narrative. The nature of story-telling is the primary issue, and each essay in the book should be seen as a separate story. These are fact-based stories, but how the writer shapes them gives them their meaning, their effect, their reason for existence.

In the first essay in the book, Narayan discusses precisely the art of the story-teller and the way in which the story-teller uses language, stock characters and situations, symbols, and the elements of life to entertain and enlighten. Narayan is talking here specifically of a certain type of traditional narrative that has been handed down over time, the legends and the myths that have particular meaning to the Indian people. The story-teller is part of the Indian village, said to be isolated from the mainstream of modern life:

Looking at them from outside, one may think that they lack the amenities of modern life; but actually they have no sense of missing much; on the contrary, they give an impression of living in a state of secret enchantment (3).

Part of this enchantment is their relationship to the story-teller and the stories he tells. Narayan is not himself a story-teller in this sense, but he is making the analogy between what he does as a chronicle

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just beneath the surface but never brought out into view because that would not be possible in any one sitting. Just as the story-teller represents the whole in symbolism without trying to embody the whole in every story, so does the writer such as Narayan find the life of India in the small acts of common people, with every individual different even though all have some commonalities in their culture. In the essays in this book, Narayan reveals much about himself and about his culture. The essays examine different aspects of Indian life, such as the way the people dress, the shopping they do, their politics, their entertainments, their family life, and some idea of the topography of the country and the different modes of life between city and country. India is a crowded country, and Narayan has come to like crowds, as he notes when he writes: Any crowd interests me: I always feel that it is a thing that deserves precedence over any other engagement. . . I am convinced that a good crowd is worth any sacrifice in the world (37). In such a crowded society, noise is a particular problem, and Narayan sees this as perhaps the noisiest age in human history: We create a lot of noise not only to show that we are in a happy, fe

Category: Literature - A