Point of View

The novel is told almost entirely from the perspective of Raman, with a few key exceptions when Daisy and Raman’s Aunt give their own point of view through instances of direct speech. The effect of this use of point of view is that all of the other characters in the novel are filtered and distorted through Raman’s perspective, which is shown by the author to be unreliable due to his wild imagination and anxious thoughts in which he creates scenarios in his mind which are unlikely to happen. For example, when irritated with Daisy’s zealous commitment to the goal of population control, Raman idly thinks: “He speculated on what would happen if he caught a couple of women in each village and went to bed with them and thus, in ten months, fouled up Daisy’s anticipated five per cent improvement!” (53) – a...