Alienation, Identity and Structure in Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice

Abstract

The individual’s alienation from his fellow man and from himself and his search for identity constitute the thematic center of Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice and his other novels, The Foreigner, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas and The Last Labyrinth.¹ Alienation, sociological or psychological, is often the consequence of the loss of identity. Alienation and identity are closely intertwined: whether one seeks identity with a lover or a culture, the search has social, moral and spiritual dimensions, which are interrelated, especially in the sense that the focal point in each case is the discovery of the self. Ratan Rathor, the protagonist-narrator in The Apprentice, who narrates the story of his own life in a somewhat episodic and reflective manner, is initially an idealist like his father but is later obliged to sacrifice his idealism in the face of the harsh, frustrating realities of bourgeois existence. A sham, a crook, a debauch and a whore, Ratan Rathor ponders the cryptic loss of his idealism, aspiring to the awakening in himself of a perspective that will give meaning to his own existence and to this cruel, chaotic world, the classic example of which is the sensual image of the city that, burning in its own nakedness at night, subsumes all and everything. The Brigadier considers the world “a beautiful whore—to be assaulted and taken” (18).²