A Comparative Reading of the Postcolonial Pícaro in F. Sionil Jose’s Mass and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
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This paper was originally submitted as a final requirement for the author’s compliance in the course LIT 607: Seminar in Comparative Literature (2017). * * * I. Appropriating and Adapting Genres of the West Perhaps one of the more benign unintended consequences to have emerged from the era of colonization is the appropriation of Western literary forms by writers from formerly colonized regions of the world. This allows them to inject their own native sentiments and leads to new, unexpected ways of rendering these forms. Case in point is the novel. Its “closeness to life in the raw and society in the making” (Maiorino xii) made it the perfect mode to capture folkloric, precolonial ways of looking at the world—views that were gradually eroding as a result of Western hegemony, influence, and education—and reconcile it with a new, postcolonial identity. The epic—a more traditional way of telling a people’s history and a form present among numerous cultures—was...