R.K. Narayan's outlook is primarily comic. It is comic in a broad philosophic sense, which enables him to weave all the bizarre events into a beautific vision of life; in which every small event, every small acquaintance, however, insignificant and absurd it might seem, turns out to have a meaningful role in the eternal scheme of things.
Narayan's vision is shaped by a strong Indian sensibility that precludes any possibility of tragedy, because man here is safely placed in a cosmic hierarchy with relations extending not only to his fellow men but also to Nature and God, not only in time and space but also beyond time and space. In the scheme of things man is responsible to God as much as God is responsible to man. In hours of human helplessness God's grace comes to help, as it is symbolically affirmed in The Man Eater of Malgudi. In such a universe man is never driven to the 'boundary situations so as to feel completely abandoned. The Indian world view holds that the world and the various human attachments are 'maya', and failure on the mundane level does not necessarily bring any awful sense of tragedy. For the Indian, man is finally, not alienated from but united with the universe or with the source of all creation. With the cycle of cause and effect ('Karma') operating from birth to rebirth, and man assured of the ultimate spiritual reunion, no final pessimism is possible. Moreover, the Indian traditional society by means of its rigid social and moral codes maintains a keen sense of social cohesion thus making any alienation or disintegration impossible. Malgudi comedy underlines this traditional Indian belief in the ultimate integration. This also corroborates the views of critics like Potts and Northrop Frye with regard to the Comic. Potts believes that there is in man's character a compelling tendency which seeks integration with the life of his society, to merge with others and to be a part of something greater than the individual self:
The conviction that the individual is unimportant except as a part of something wider; the impulse to mix, and to seek common ground with the rest of one's kind....2
Potts calls this, 'social sense which forms the basis of comedy.
This social sense is the dominant motif in Narayan's novels. In them "the social and moral world are contiguous" and "the social world is properly conceived a moral world.
..." The emphasis is not so much on puritan moral values as it is on a social consciousness rooted in traditional morality that nevertheless allows concessions to human frailties. To quote Northrop Frye:
Comedy usually moves towards a happy ending, and the normal response of the audience to a happy ending is 'this should be', which sounds like a moral judgment. So it is, except that it is not moral in the restricted sense, but social.
Its opposite is not the villainous but the absurd.
Characters like Sampath and Vasu are dismissed because they become absurd in the Malgudi setting. At the heart of Nara-yan's comedy there is an awareness of absurdity. Even though in his novels there is a perceptible moral bias, "one feels that the social judgment against the absurd is closer to the comic norm than the moral judgment against the wicked". In his comic world the characters are purged of their absurdities and are integrated with the society.
But through these absurd characters-printer, poet, maneater, guide, financial expert, sweets vendor-Narayan weaves his Malgudi comedy that follows the traditional comic pattern of order-disorder-order. Narayan's heroes, notwithstanding their stupidity, rebel against all social constrictions which thwart their freedom. Their actions embody their existential defiance against a hostile universe. But in the process they fall into incongruous and absurd situations in relation to their society.
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