In this presentation I have compared The White Tiger text by Arvind Adiga to The Native Son by Richard Wright

1. The New
Literature

2. Comparison of ………..

3. Index
•About ‘The White Tiger’
•About ‘The Native Son’
•Comparison of the Protagonist
•Comparison of their Crime
•Comparison of their Native Place
•Conclusion

4. About ‘The White Tiger’
 The book is written by Arvind
Adiga in 2008.
 His book is 2008 Booker Prize
winner novel.
 The novel describes contemporary
Indian Society very deeply and
Effectively.
 The tone of the novel is satirical.

5. About ‘The Native Son’
 Native Son (1940) is a novel
written by African-American
author Richard Wright.
 It is a Social Protest novel.
 The novel describes the crime
done by it’s protagonist Bigger.
 The place which is used here is
Chicago.

6. Comparison of Protagonist
 Main Characters : Balram Halwai & Bigger Thomas.
 Born into sharply divided societies where the lower classes
struggle in terrible poverty without hope of advancement.
 Both reflect a Manichean duality of rich/master/powerful and
poor/servant/oppressed.
 Poverty, frustration, hopelessness, and humiliation figure into
the complex of causes that result in violent crime.
 Both Bigger and Balram turn to violence to escape the
oppression that threatens their goals for livelihood and manhood.
 Both men bite the hands that feed them by committing acts of
homicide and proves it as an existential act.

7. Comparision of their …
 Bigger kills Mary Dalton which was accidental where as Balram kills his
master Ashok was an act of violence which includes robbery too.
 Bigger’s killing of Mary Dalton was accidental. Bigger’s first crime results
from a chain of events:
-Mary goes to meet her boyfriend
-She insist Bigger to socialize and drink with them
- her boyfriend’s decision to leave Mary with Bigger although she was
completely drunk
- the temptation of Bigger when he finds himself alone with Mary in her
bedroom and begins to kiss her
- the accidental interruption of Mrs. Dalton, which terrifies Bigger into
strangling the girl

8. Continue…
 If any of these chain would have broken, Mary would not have been killed.
Balram commits an act of planned murder to achieve his destiny as an
entrepreneur.
 To become a master rather than a servant, Balram must kill. There is no other
way for Balram to break out of the cage.
 Balram’s cold-blooded killing of Ashok follows a period of employment in
which he has bonded with his master—in contrast to Bigger, who hardly knew
the Daltons.
 To Ashok, Balram may be “stupid as hell but he is honest” and therefore
should be valued as driver.
 Just as Mrs. Dalton was physically blind, Ashok, although sighted, is blind to
the wheels that are clicking inside Balram’s head.

9. A turning point comes when Pinky Madam runs over a child on a
highway while driving drunk, they expect that Balram will take the
rap and go to jail “loyal as a dog”.
 Ashok loses Balram’s affection and respect by becoming like other
masters who visit whores and drink too much.
 After Ashok’s new girlfriend urges him to seek a replacement driver,
Balram firmly decides to murder his master.
 He acts murder and the murder weapon was a broken bottle of
Johnny Walker Black—the drink of India’s elite.
Continue…

10. Comparison of their Native Place
Bigger Thomas
 Born in Chicago and grown up in
the slum areas.
 In Bigger’s Chicago there is an
absolute divide between white
and black.
 In Bigger’s Chicago, blacks remain
suppressed as a result of racial
oppression and religious passivity.
Balram Halwai
 Born and grown up in India’s little
village Lakshmangarh.
 Balram is born in grinding
poverty, in a world known as “The
Darkness”.
 In Balram’s India, it is the family
that tightens the wires of the
rooster coop.

11. Conclusion..
 Manichean model of power
 Opposing binaries
 Voiceless subalterns
 Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry
 Fanon’s theory that violence is a cleansing force that frees the
colonized from their inferiority complex and gives them a measure of
self-respect.

12. Reference
 Schotland, Sara D. "Breaking out of the rooster coop." JSTORE (2011):
20. pdf.