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Unit 11: Next Sunday by R K Narayan

discover that it is really about them, and, quite commonly, about their childhood. Swami and Notes
Friends, Narayan’s first novel, is a novel of boyhood, which draws heavily on his own experiences.
The publication of a first novel is one thing; security in the literary world is another. Swami and
Friends was well reviewed, but was not a commercial success. In the years that followed, Narayan
had to seek a variety of different publishers, and it was to be some time before his reputation
was secured amongst a wide international audience. His personal circumstances were also
sometimes difficult. A few years later, his wife, Rajam, died of typhoid. Narayan was devastated.
In My Days, he wrote, I have described this part of my experience of her sickness and death in The
English Teacher so fully that I do not and perhaps cannot, go over it again. More than any other
book, The English Teacher is autobiographical in content, very little part of it being fiction . . .
The toll that typhoid took and all the desolation that followed, with a child to look after, and the
psychic adjustments, are based on my own experience.
R K Narayan is a much beloved novelist, and for very good reason. Although the books in this
volume were all written more than half a century ago, they are the freshest, the most sparkling
of gems. The struggle of the characters against social restrictions, their struggle to be something
other than that which social destiny appears to be forcing them to be, are struggles with which
we can all identify to a greater or lesser extent. As Samuel Johnson observed, many people waste
part of their lives trying to be something they are not. Eventually, of course, they may come to
realize what they really are, and if that happens to be a citizen of a small town, rather like
Narayan’s Malgudi, bound up with neighbours and their concerns, sewn into a family and a
nation, and then there are very much worse fates than that.
R K Narayan in a way is a distracting though unobtrusive puzzle to many. Everyone is irresistibly
attracted to the work of R K Narayan. A sense of overpowering intimacy is established and the
characters become intimate personalities after our heart. Perhaps there is simple magic, the
magic of delicious and divine humour that tickles and tantalizes, thrills and illumines, combining
humanity, sympathy and love. He affects this comedic catharsis in the most compelling and in
the most natural way in us. If one is not to be driven to distraction, cynicism, and depression by
the bewildering couple of modern mechanical and insipid existence. The artificial life of the
straining, confusing, drying modernity one is to take a dip in, nay, a full infusion of, the healthy,
sweet, invigorating life-springs of R K Narayan’s honour, which combines in a unique way life’s
comedy and pathos, sweetness and sadness.

Did u know? In 1980, R K Narayan was awarded the A C Benson Medal by the Royal
Society of Literature and was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1989, he was made a member of the Rajya Sabha.

11.2 Writing Style

Narayan’s writing style was simple and unpretentious with a natural element of humour about
it. It focused on ordinary people, reminding the reader of next-door neighbours, cousins and the
like, thereby providing a greater ability to relate to the topic. Unlike his national contemporaries,
he was able to write about the intricacies of Indian society without having to modify his
characteristic simplicity to conform to trends and fashions in fiction writing. He also employed
the use of nuanced dialogic prose with gentle Tamil overtones based on the nature of his
characters. Critics have considered Narayan to be the Indian Chekhov, due to the similarities in
their writings, the simplicity and the gentle beauty and humour in tragic situations. Greene
considered Narayan more similar to Chekhov than any Indian writer. Anthony West of The New
Yorker considered Narayan’s writings to be of the realism variety of Nikolai Gogol.

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