Point of View

Vivek Shanbhag’s novella Ghachar Ghochar is told from the limited-omniscient first person point of view with access to the narrator’s interiority. There is only a single narrator who is both seen and known by the reader. Shanbhag’s narrator is biased; thus, the accuracy of his interpretation of events is questionable. The narrative perspective remains constant throughout the text, but the tense varies, with frequent switches between the past and present tense.

Language and Meaning

The novella Ghachar Ghochar was originally written and published in the South Indian language Kannada. The English-language version that this guide considers is a translation; thus, the words that appear are not literally those of the original text, a fact to be considered in terms of interpretation and analyzing. Though despite its foreign origin, the story presented in Ghachar Ghochar feels universally applicable.

Vivek Shanbhag employs the rhetorical...