THE PURSUIT OF SELF- DISCOVERY IN SELECTED NOVELS OF ARUN JOSHI (Pages 19-32) by Ms. Annie George Raphael in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Arun Joshi’s novels portray the modern man’s problems of the self. Joshi beautifully displays the inner discord in the protagonist’s personality. He makes an exploratory exposition of the self through perceptions of the past and through the alienation experiences of the present. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas portrays Billy’s quest for self, his inner being to achieve self-realization the way ancient sages and seers in the Indian legends and religious texts did for spiritual sublimation. In The Apprentice, Ratans’ realization of his own self is an outcome of his overt confession to the National Cadet. In Indian philosophy, confession is a necessary process for the purification of one’s own self. Joshi shows how Ratan carries his inner emptiness. Deeply influenced by the techniques of the Upanishads and the Gita, Joshi looks upon man’s life on the earth as apprentice in soul-making. Joshi has imbibed, in a significant way, the essential messages of the Indian religious heritage, the teachings of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Sankhya system of Indian philosophy, and also of spiritual leaders and thinkers. In Arun Joshi’s novels, this awareness of the self is inspired by a confrontation with some crisis, and the self is subjected to a groping and probing which is a great therapeutic process. The protagonists encounter all these labyrinths, but their groping in dark reaches an illumination. Keywords: Self, alienation, realization, illumination, exploratory, quest, protagonist, soul making