Narrative Techniques in The White Tiger

Narrative technique examines how a narration is done in a work of fiction and what are the

multiple devices of storytelling at work in a work such as a novel. Narrative technique is central

to our understanding of the novel as a study of it primarily examines the techniques with which

the author has employed language in narration. This paper examines the narrative techniques

used by Aravind Adiga in the novel The White Tiger by focusing on four aspects of narration-

narrator, vision, voice and time. These four aspects combine to create a narrative and examining

them can explain the narrative techniques at work in the novel.

The White Tiger is narrated by its protagonist, Balram Halwai. The novel proceeds through

first person narration and we see the world as seen and experienced by Balram. Balram is the

transmitter of the story from the author to the reader. He has absolute dominance on the

narrative voice and it is hard to see other characters as independent agents in the sense that they

have a free or individual voice. The voice of other characters reach the reader heavily mediated

by Balram’s narrative voice.

The narration is aimed, according to the story, at the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabo, who is

scheduled to visit Bangalore. The implied reader of the narrative however is a larger audience,

who broadly fall into the categories of upper class, upper caste Indians as well as most

foreigners. The readership is supposed to be a vast and diverse group whose only connecting

quality is that they are unfamiliar or unacquainted with the hinterlands of India, where Balram

was born and brought up. The narration is an exercise in bringing this hinterland to this

audience. As the “narratee” of the novel, Wen Jiabo is an intriguing choice. He represents

China, a growing power and a country which is often looked upon with awe and envy by many

Indians, especially when the topics of development and economic growth come into discussion.

The novel places the Chinese Premier as eager to learn about India, and the “truth about

Bangalore”. The implied reader too then is someone who wants to know about the truth about

India but is very likely to be misled by official, national propaganda of the likes of India

Shining. An idea of to whom Adiga is narrating the story assumes great importance, especially

as the novel seeks to portray the condition of India and the predicament of its often unseen and

underdeveloped regions. While the “narratee” is largely a textual construct, it is reasonable to

assume that Adiga is reaching out to the implied audience and that he is conveying a certain

message and idea of India through his narration.

The term “point of view”, often used when discussing narrative techniques, combines the

aspects of vision and voice. Vision is the criteria that determines who sees the action, or through

whom the reader can see the action, and to what extent this vision is complete or aware of the

narrative action when it happens. One may conceive of different types of narrative visions

depending upon the ratio between the narrator’s knowledge of events and the characters

knowledge of these events. In The White Tiger, the narrator controls the plot tightly and is

aware of most events that are relevant to the story. Since the story focuses upon the life of the

narrator himself, the vision of the narrator is absolute. One may observe that Balram’s

knowledge of events, aided by hindsight, is more than what the characters know. To maintain

this, Adiga uses the narrative techniques of flashback and flashforward. However, we are also

given instances where Balram’s naiveté means that he often realises the true nature of events

only at a later time. His ideas regarding the relationship between Ashok and Uma is a prominent

example of the character’s knowledge exceeding that of the narrator. Thus, in this novel, we

may observe the degrees of vision altering from time to time. Further, we are privy only to

Balram’s vision throughout the novel. We do not see any event through the eyes of any other

character. The narrator’s voice does not become a soundtrack to the vision of another character.

The vision afforded to the reader in this novel is thus fixed.

However, the idea of vision should not be restricted to just the act of seeing. It should also

include how the narrator conceptualizes other characters and events. It involved thought

process in addition to the physical act of seeing. In this regard, Balram has a very distinctive

vision of the world. It is not a sophisticated or nuanced way of looking at the world, but is

rather very blunt and obviously a product of his self-interests and instinct for survival. He does

not maintain any semblance of objectivity in his narrative. He almost flippantly lets his biases

determine his descriptions and characterisations of the village of Laxmangarh and its people.

The voice of the narrator, Balram, is in first person throughout the novel. Further, Balram is

directly involved in the action and is often the principal focus of the narration. It is an account

of the acts he commits and the things that happen to him. Almost all of the action is narrated at

the level at which it occurs. This is possible because most of the action focuses on the narrator

himself. However, there are some points in the novel when Balram is only a spectator to events

that occur to other people. The most prominent of these events concern Ashok, his master. On

these occasions, the narrative shifts to being about the action rather than the action itself. In

The White Tiger, even in these occasions, Balram is the main agent. He is the active consumer

of the events that happen before his eyes. We are never given access to the experiences, feelings

or thoughts of other characters who are the primary actors in many events. Rather, we see them

in the way Balram consumes these events.

The voice of a narration is also a carrier of ideologies that are present in, or acts upon, the

society that the novel talks about. The voice of narration is essentially language and the

expression of a certain discourse that has political and cultural ideologies associated with it.

The narrative of Balram is actively opposed, in voice and ideology, to the speech of other

characters, especially those of the upper classes. While the voice of Balram always tries to

impose itself upon the novel, one can find other voices opposed to Balram frequently rising,

only to be pushed back.

The implied readers, as well as the narratee, are distanced from the narrator by virtue of their

class positions. The voice of the narrator becomes a technique with which the author tries to

reduce this distance and make the reader sympathise with the narrator. By “exposing” the true

nature of class dynamics in India, Balram appeals to a sense of fairness or justice in Wen Jiabo

as well as in the reader to sympathise with his cause. The success of Adiga’s narrative technique

lies in how far he can persuade the reader to sympathise with a protagonist who murders his

master with a broken bottle, steals his car and money to set up his own business. This sympathy

is garnered chiefly through presenting Balram as someone who comes from a socially

oppressed and backward milieu that the only way he can break free of all that holds him back

is through violence. The narrator may be broadly said to have three roles- reporting,

interpreting and evaluating facts, characters and events. It is through tweaking and

manipulating these criteria that Adiga evolves a narrative technique that can make the reader

sympathise with Balram. Thus, Balram underreports or misreports some facts, such as that the

Halwai caste is a middle level caste and thus not the most oppressed ones in the Darkness and

probably even complicit in the oppression of lower castes. Balram’s narrative technique uses

such misreporting and misinterpretation in order to reduce the affective and ethical distance

between the reader and the narrator.

The narrative of The White Tiger does not progress in a linear fashion. The way time operates

in a narrative can be examined under different criteria. One such criteria is the order in which

the events of the story are presented in the narrative. The White Tiger uses the devices of

flashback and flashforward to present the story. The narration often jumps between time

frames, from Balram’s present to his past and back. Balram occasionally breaks the narrative

chain to directly address the Chinese Premier, his intended audience, and by extension, the

reader, to comment upon certain events or certain characteristics of the society and people from

his current vantage point. The novel thus jumps from one temporal frame to another. The use

of flashbacks enables a strong narrator voice and also brings out the contrast between the

current Balram and the various Balrams at different points of the story. The flashback and

flashforward are common techniques used in letter writing as well. As the letter, novel and all

forms of narration essentially recount events of the past, it is common to comment upon it with

the aid of hindsight. The rigid linearity of a narrative is, in this sense, an artificiality. By using

these devices, Adiga is able to bring an authenticity to the narration and bring out the affective

nature of the letter as a narrative form.

A second criteria that may be used is that of duration. This criteria looks at the relation between

the amount of time an event would actually take and the amount of time that is devoted to this

event in the narrative. For the most part, the narrative in The White Tiger maintains a proportion

with regard to the time events take in real life. A departure from this is most evident towards

the end of the novel, where Balram makes his escape from Delhi after killing Ashok. But the

main action of the narrative, Balram’s rise from Laxmangarh to Delhi and his life there,

culminating in the murder of his master is narrated in a uniform fashion, where large periods

of time are not elided over in a few sentences.

A third category that one may use is the frequency with which the narrative describes a certain

event. In The White Tiger no particular event is narrated repeatedly, though Adiga goes back

to certain places as symbols or motifs. While no event is repeated in narration, Adiga ensures

that key images from several incidents, such as the lizard, the Black Fort, the water buffalo and

many others are present and referenced in different parts of the narration.

The novel tells the story of a teenage boy, born and raised in the village of Laxmangarh in

Bihar, who overcomes the forces of caste and class through nefarious and questionable methods

to work in Delhi and to finally become an entrepreneur in Bangalore. The narrative sequence

bears a semblance to the classical five part structure proposed by Gustav Freytag. The novel

begins with an exposition as we are introduced to the protagonist, Balram, and a vivid and

damning picture of his ancestral village. The reader is given a comprehensive view of the

political and cultural forces at play in the village and the dominant power structures that define

the lives of people. The story of Balram, right from his childhood, serves as an illustration of

how the village works. The action begins to rise as we are given occasional glances into

Balram’s innate ambition and his latent desire to escape from all that constricts him. This part

of the narrative shows Balram learning the art of living in the margins and peripheries, as a

servant to the more affluent. We see him bloom as a street smart driver, increasingly capable

of looking after himself, learning how to negotiate his masters and the city and nurture his

ambition of one day being his own man. The action rises to a pitch and reaches the climax

when Balram kills Ashok, his master, steals a large amount of money and escapes from Delhi.

The action falls as we are fast tracked into the present of the narrator and reaches a denouement

when Balram lets us know his future plans and a prophecy on the condition of India.

The White Tiger comes under the category of epistolary novel, as it is written in the form of

letters to the Chinese Premier. Balram writes a set of e-mails, seeking to expose the true nature

of Bangalore and India, which the Chinese Premier is apparently eager to understand. Adiga

uses the epistolary form as a device to facilitate a first person narrative. The e-mails serve as

expressions of Balram’s personal thoughts and feelings about the conditions in which he grew

up and the methods which he had to adopt to break free of them. The letters allow Adiga to

construct a deeply personal narrative in the first person, without having to resort to an

omniscient narrator. It presents the story as shaped by Balram’s view of things, his biases and

personal experience. It also enables Adiga to give Balram a unique and characteristic narrative

voice and world view.

The use of the epistolary form as a narrative technique is interesting, given the history of the

form. The epistolary form first came into prominence in the seventeenth century and was one

of the preferred forms in the early days of the novel. The epistolary form democratised the art

of literary writing, especially as the novel took root among the middle classes and especially

women. These categories of people did not traditionally have a training in classical literature,

methods of writing and rhetoric. The art of writing letters, and writing novels under the guise

of letters, soon emerged as an attractive proposition to writers who came from these classes.

Balram is similarly a member of a class with low literacy and almost no tradition in writing

novels in English. In the novel itself, we are told that Balram is perhaps the only student in the

village school who is passably literate. Balram is forced to drop out of school soon and he does

not return to formal education after that. Originating from such a background, one does not

expect the protagonist to be well versed in the art of constructing a narrative. Adiga uses the

epistolary form to add to the authenticity of Balram’s narrative. There is no reason for someone

like Balram to write a novel. What we read as the novel is presented as a series of letters,

perhaps a more plausible product from one of the sons of the Darkness.

Indeed, it is inconceivable that Wen Jiabo, then Chinese Premier, would reply to Balram’s e-

mails. Adiga does not even tell us if Balram actually sent the e-mails or whether he has just

typed them out. Further, Balram would never be afforded the opportunity of actually meeting

Jiabo, especially as he is one of the least known entrepreneurs of Bangalore. Balram’s e-mails

are a form of communication which would be impossible in any other form- he cannot tell his

story directly to Jiabo or to the world as he would not be given such an opportunity. His letter

is a creation of an opportunity, a voice to narrate a story.

The epistolary novel is not only about the letters and its writer, but also about the reader and

how readers interpret letters. One can only wonder what Wen Jiabo might make of the novel,

but it is obvious that it is also addressed to those Indians who live in the light, who are blissfully

unaware of the lives that a large section of the country lead. The narrative invites these

outsiders, as much an other to Balram as the Chinese Premier, to interpret the story of his life,

to understand the predicament of the Darkness.

At the end of the first e-mail, the reader is told that Balram slit the throat of his master, Ashok.

The climax of the narrative is thus exposed in the exposition itself. The rest of the novel is an

explanation, patiently constructed, as to how a sequence of events led to the climax. Adiga

maintains the narrative tension and suspense by making the climactic act appear really difficult

or hard for Balram. Adiga’s narrative paints a portrait where the odds are stacked against a

servant killing his master, where it would take extraordinary amounts of courage, conviction

and individualism to commit such an act. Balram killing Ashok is a release for the protagonist

from his oppressive social conditions, but also a release of the narrative tension that was being

built from the first page of the novel. It is a fine example of a character being at odds with his

social surroundings and acting in a manner that is completely unwarranted, or unexpected of

him. It is precisely the unexpected nature of Balram’s act that makes the narrative tension

possible. At the same time, the reader has been privy to Balram’s character, his thoughts and

feelings and his ambition from the start and know that this is exactly what he wants to do. Thus,

there is no surprise in the sense that the reader, equipped with hindsight, does not expect Balram

to kill his master. The novel, as a genre that talks about the past, enables the reader to look back

upon the events.

The narrative in The White Tiger proceeds through the construction and exploration of

difference. Balram continually constructs oppositions between light/dark, big bellies/small

bellies, landlords/villagers and many others. It is through exploring the opposition between

each category that Balram moves ahead. He is quick to consign things into any one side of

these binaries. There is no doubt as to which sides of these binaries Balram identifies with. His

relationship with people and objects are often processed through the process of labelling and

categorizing. Thus, the narrative proceeds though a Manichean dualism.

A prominent dualism that runs through the novel is that of light and dark. Balram’s village,

Laxmangarh, is situated in the Darkness. The main motifs of the village are described as black

and dark. Adiga creates a chiaroscuro of sorts as the narrative shifts between the shining India

and the Darkness. The Light is where everybody wants to be and yet Balram and other

immigrants from Darkness often find this world strange and untenable to their sense of

morality. Adiga uses the imagery of the light and dark to bring out the experience of the often

unseen underclass as they balance themselves between the two Indias to earn a living. There is

the Ganga, supposedly life giving, but filled with black muck which drags down everything

and everyone. It is the black river, river of Death, which can chock and stunt. Though known

as the river of illumination, everywhere it flows is the Darkness. Opposite to what the Prime

Minister and the government might tell Wen Jiabo, it is hardly pure.

Perhaps the most prominent symbol in Balram’s life in the darkness and one that plays a role

in telling the reader of the transformation he makes is the Black Fort. The fort rises over

Lamnagarh, a reminder of its centuries of subservience. It is a source of unknown fear,

symbolised by darkness. When Balram finally climbs the hill and reaches the fort, a shift in his

outlook is evident. He looks upon his village and spits. He spits on the Black Fort and all that

which had held him in the binds of ignorant fear. The act of conquering the Black Fort becomes

the launching pad from where he slits Ashok’s throat in eight months. His grandmother Kusum,

who stands for the old and traditional that has stifled the Darkness, discourages him from

climbing the hill through a rhetoric of fear. By disregarding the fear that was instilled in him

from a young age, Balram conquers his masters and the Black Fort.

The narrative of The White Tiger can be classified in many ways. The novel is obviously a

picaresque narrative in that it tells the story of a jaunty rascal or a rogue who lives by his wits

to get the better of his social superiors and conditions. The very nature of the picaresque

narrative rejects the idea that one’s destiny is determined by the social status into which one is

born. The White Tiger is a novel that emphasises this ideology. The distance between the

persona of Balram and his younger selves serve as the basis for an important dynamic in the

novel. The narration is episodic in structure, each letter serving as an episode or a section.

Balram is shown moving from place to place in a struggle for survival and the novel finishes

with an open ending, though the social status of the picaro is relatively secure. The novel is

also deeply satiric, especially about the social mores of the urban elite and rich. Adiga’s

narrative technique is mocking of greed and avarice of the village landlords and their

shenanigans in Delhi. It does not spare even the liberal face of the master, embodied in Ashok,

Balram’s master. The narrative itself is told in plain and everyday language that the picaro that

is Balram would be likely to use and understand. It does not have a sophisticated grand style

or flourish, but stays true to the narrative tone and voice of the protagonist. The novel is hardly

an example of a perfect or classic picaresque novel, departing on many counts from the

traditional conception or definition of the genre. As opposed to the conventional idea, Balram’s

acts definitely fall under the category of the criminal, having murdered a man by means of a

whiskey bottle to the head. The novel also has a well-defined plot and Balram exhibits a

development or change in character as the narrative proceeds.

The White Tiger is thus also a Bildungsroman. The novel traces the growth of Balram from

being a “country-mouse” to a white tiger. It is a narrative of a village bumpkin’s growth into a

successful social and business entrepreneur and thus a coming of age narrative. The novel

tracks Balram’s passage and growth through life, from his first job, his educational experiences,

his first forays into the city, his first sexual experience, his growth as a driver, the stages of

earning the trust of his masters and finally his attainment of a new social identity. We see

Balram at the start of the novel as a boy approaching adulthood and we are witness to his

growth into a successful man, a man who has realized his vision. Though the narrative by its

nature does not put Balram through a spiritual crisis, he undergoes several experiences that

changes him as a person. These changes are perhaps most evident when we see how he deals

with the family of a young man who is killed by one of his drivers. He is still the street savvy

businessman who puts his business interests first, but he has grown beyond the callous and

capitalist interests of his masters into a more humane approach. The novel does not show us a

Balram who tries to change the world, but it tells the story of a man who tries to get the best he

can out of the society around him. That can be made to happen only by achieving class mobility,

by moving into the upper classes. Balram as a member of the lower class is the problematic

element of this Bildungsroman. He reconciles with the concrete society around him by finding

a place for himself in the upper echelons of society, but yet remaining invisible. If the

Bildungsroman tracks the progressive development of a character into masterful selfhood, the

narrative of The White Tiger fits perfectly.