Structure in The Guide Essay

THE GUIDE STRUCTURE

The novel begins as a third person narrative but Narayan limits the narrative perspective or standpoint to Rajus consciousness almost entirely. We never enter, for example, Rosies or Marcos consciousness which has the effect of keeping them ambiguous or mysterious especially Rosie. Just once, we seem to move away from Rajus perspective when Velans idiot brother relates his encounter with Raju to the villagers. Otherwise, Narayan sticks consistently to the Raju standpoint.

The third person narrative is more neutral than the first but because of the restriction above we are still within Rajus mind and his assumptions.

The novel begins towards the chronological end of the story. The use of the two different narratives, the unchronological order of the account, and the fact that we know, right from the start, that Rajus life has met with some disaster which landed him in prison creates mystery or interest and conflates the past, present and future.

Much of the novel is Raju relating to Velan his life story in the first person, in a vain attempt to show that he is not a holy man with gifted insight but an ex-convict, ex and present conman, living by his wits parasitically off the villagers credulity.

A first person narrative is by definition subjective and limited to the consciousness of one person. Since this person is relating his own account, it naturally expresses his own view or prejudices so that the reader must always be conscious that things may not be quite what the first person narrator says that they are.

In the course of his first person narrative, Raju frequently blames Rosie, Marco, fate or whatever for his troubles and also often condemns himself without meaning to although as often he gives a credible explanation for why he behaves the way he does. For example, he attributes his tendency to mislead people or lie, to desire to please them which stems form his essential good nature (combined with laziness).

Although Rajus first person account begins with mention of Rosie, he then retreats further into the past to his childhood, schooling, shopkeeping and early days in Malgudi as Railway Raju the guide. This account is interrupted early on by Velans problem, his sister, an interruption designed to introduce us to Velan so that the basic framework of the novel is set up - an account within an account which starts near the end (or at least the second period of Rajus living as a con-man cum guru as opposed to a con-man cum guide).

The title The Guide can refer simultaneously and ironically and ambiguously to both Rajus roles as guide.

We meet the only other major character in the novel, Rosie, in chapter five, p55, a quarter of the way through the novel although Raju has mentioned her earlier. Her husband Marco (we dont know his real name) remains an odd, undeveloped character because to Raju he is just an impediment. Naturally, he is all eyes for Rosie. All the other characters in the story, his father, his mother, his uncle, Gaffur, Velan, Velans idiot brother etc etc are realistic figures, acting out their lives in the social comedy of Malgudi or Mangal, nowhere places in rural or at least non-big city India, backward in that the railway only reaches them in the mid-twentieth century (as opposed to up to a hundred years earlier). The minor characters are sympathetically if unsentimentally drawn, comic, sometimes pathetic.

In many ways Raju and Rosie are both modern people (although just to confuse things and ironically Rosie has a conservative side as well). Rosie has risen above her dancing girl caste through education and a calculated marriage. The rest of Malgudi-Mangal is conservative or traditional or just simple or ill-informed or dim.

Rajus lazy dishonesty and gift of the gab eventually traps him into a position where he is obliged to sacrifice himself for the villagers. At first, of course, he tries to wriggle out of this by his full confession (I am just an ordinary human being like anyone else) to Velan at the end of chapter six p98, half-way through the novel, half-way through his account of his life as far as the reader is concerned, although chronologically his account begins at this point. His account now carries on, uninterrupted, from the end of chapter six to the beginning of chapter eleven p207, much of it concerned with Rosies transformation into Nalini and Rajus becoming her pompous, self-indulgent, wasteful agent who eventually near-ruins her, and himself ending up in jail.

In chapter eleven, we read of Rajus at first reluctant, then more accepting, apotheosis as a local saint. Or we think we might have done. Because the last chapter is an exercise in irony, comedy, pathos and ambiguity we are not sure what has happened or what we are to think the ending or could be taken any of a number of ways, depending on what we want to believe.