Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.25
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide may differ in setting, narrative structure, and historical context, but they employ animals and animal imagery to represent experiences of violence, vulnerability, loss, and displacement. In Roy’s novel, recurring representations of animals – and in particular, the moth – become intertwined with the trauma experienced by characters whose lives are shaped by social exclusion and familial conflict. In The Hungry Tide, the Royal Bengal tiger and the natural environment similarly become connected to histories of displacement, vulnerability, and human suffering.
Drawing on trauma studies and animal studies approaches, this paper explores how animal imagery functions not merely as symbolic decoration but as a means of articulating experiences that resist straightforward human expression. Particular attention is given to the relationships between human and nonhuman vulnerability and to the ways in which memory and loss are inscribed onto the natural world. By examining the two novels separately and then in comparison, this paper argues that the moth and the tiger do the same work in different registers: each gives form to trauma that cannot be spoken directly, and each is bound to a power that decides whose suffering counts. Animal imagery thus creates a shared imaginative space in which personal and collective trauma intersect, suggesting that experiences of loss can cross the boundary between human and nonhuman life.
Ishikawa, Constance L. “Linked by Loss: Exploring Trauma through Animal Imagery in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 448-63, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.25.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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