Form

The epistolary form of Adiga's White Tiger is significant in the way we have to interpret Balram's arguments. I've slipped up several times and thought his prose was directed at me and even forgot he was ostensibly writing in letters. While yes, this is true to the extent that a novel is directed at its audience/reader, Balram is speaking to the Premier of China, initially somewhat formally and easing into a familiarity fairly quickly. I press on this because of his intentions to describe entrepreneurship in India by discussing the forming of one of its own, namely himself. What a fucking joke. Leagues are described about the character in the way he speaks Man to Man towards the Premier. In breaking out of the metaphorical chicken coop he has won the ability to address those classically above his station on an even level as well as to share inside (and of course more truthful) information about his country that the Premier will certainly not find with the smiling, upwardly mobile India, the tourist face, the governmental face that he will encounter. Now we have no way of knowing, and we assume to the contrary, whether these correspondence were sent in the world of the fiction. I'd imagine not personally as they are fairly incriminating. It is significant only in that they were written and in the form of their writing. Balram claimed his manhood and passed into a higher lifestyle at the expense of his former life and relations. That is the price of the coop. A man who has escaped however can now speak levelly with Premiers and world-movers.