Digital Object Identifier
Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart is a novel about Ritwik’s transnational transit from Calcutta to London. He migrates to the West, laden with the hope that it would detach and liberate him from the childhood trauma and problems of his life in Calcutta. The paper attempts to investigate how childhood trauma remains inextricably tethered to his new space in the First World nation. Taking the theoretical framework of Homi Bhabha’s “unhomeliness” and Sigmund Freud’s “uncanny” as the entry point, the paper locates the uncanny in the character's sheer incomprehensibility of his surroundings and situations that unfold through a close reading of the text. The paper endeavours to locate the uncanny in the fictional writing of Ritwik, which possesses an uncanny isomorphism with his life in England.
Mr. Niku Chetia. “Locating the “uncanny” in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 633-646. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.39.
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