Unlocking the fetters of Anguish: An Existential Approach towards Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors

Abstract

Literature is a reflection of life and the various experiences which encompass the same. It is equivalently outstanding and questionable to say that one must write from experience. It is believed by Donald Barthelme that, “The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart” (117). Modern fiction has come a very long way from those early subtle and obvious beginnings, but the inclinations that make the modern fiction writers are by heart probably not different from that of the primitive story tellers. Based on this concept it is obligatory to perceive Deshpande’s writings in the intangible construction that embraces philosophic contributions characterized in terms with regards to major themes of existentialism.

An enormous consideration has been given to the major aspects of Deshpande’s novels such as Feminism, self-alienation to self-realization, narrative techniques, determinism and will, an image of the modern woman, emancipation, and modernization, anxiety or anguish is quite different from the rest. The present paper Sarita’s anguished nature in The Dark Holds No Terrors by Deshpande aims at studying the novel by applying one of the major themes of existentialism to relate Sarita’s psychic journey of selfhood. The Dark Holds No Terrors represents the woman’s exploration of self-identification, right, and freedom from an existentialism point of view. All through her life she had remained only cornered and suffocated by her aspiration and yearnings to emerge successful at the cost of anything. Thence she decides to persist and emerge with the acknowledgment and awareness of being on its own. Anxiety or Anguish is the term suggested by most of the modern existentialist writers to illustrate the concept of being on its own, and it could possibly signify the how unique human existence actually is, and thus the fact that it cannot comprehend with itself in terms of other types of existence.

Hence, this paper deals with Sarita’s travels from darkness to light, and abiding torment having entwined the means of reflection, self-analysis, and self-realization, she surfaces as an assured individual, confident and entirely in command of herself, reasonably more optimistic and capable of conceding life just as her male fellow companions would do.