The Aesthetics of “White Tiger” strike me as pretty unique compared to the other novels so far. Adiga rarely, if ever, seems to break into the poetic mode to reveal knowledge of some expansive truth like Roy. Two passages really drive this home for me; Roy’s history house/Earth Woman passage(50-54) and Amiga’s Great Indian Rooster Coop (147-150). Roy moves through time discussing the past and later a place outside of time survey all of existence. More importantly she explores innerworlds and inner-meanings from Anglophilia to the insignificance of humanity (as it Humbles along). She rights with a sense of innocence and the spiritual. Even the way she plays with language and allusions is expansive and abstract. It lends a disembodied quality, authority beyond the speaker/narrator and seems to offer a look into deeper truth. In stark contrast Adiga’s mode is the skeptical realist. The Roster Coop isn’t a symbol, it is a metaphor. Furthermore is mechanical and structural even man-made opposed to Roy’s Earth Woman. Roy’s history house has no single meaning but rather a serious of interwoven, even contradictory themes. For Instance the forces of colonialism and their decay, a neoliberal sort of regional flavor, the refuge of little worlds apart from dominant society, physical dominance as history’s henchmen are a few themes couched in the history house. In contrast the Roster Coop is directly allegorical. It takes place in the contemporary world in the specific sphere of the (global?) marketplace. It takes a number of forces and boils them down to an image that simplifies (perhaps tries to demystify) the hugeness of peoples’ complacency in the face of economic oppression.
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