A PAINFUL SAGA OF “THE DOOMED STRANDED WANDERER” IN ARUN JOSHI’S THE STRANGE CASE OF BILLY BISWAS

Arun Joshi's protagonists are burdened with a spiritual hollowness, cynicism, severe pangs of materialism, loss of faith and identity crisis. They despairingly feel the brutality of fate turning their lives into nothingness without any purpose. A painful saga of many things including mechanization, dissatisfaction, changing moral values, spiritual emptiness in the era of modernity, Joshi in this beautiful piece of writing throws light on the obvious estrangement of its demoralised hero from the “upper crust of Indian society” with its yearning for materialism, spiritual hollowness and blind imitation of western culture in utter defiance of its traditional values and liefs. Billy desperately searches for invaluable and unanswered questions which have their relevance in the context of his own life but always encounters unacceptable yet bitter truths of life. The shattered protagonist of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, after becoming aware of the mess his life has been, acutely experiences the traumatic strains in life and desperately longs for stability and grace amidst chaos. W. B. Yeats in his great poem “The Second Coming” befittingly explains the same idea: “The things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” (Quoted in Jeffares 199). The absence of any symmetry and order makes his life a sort of hellish experience. The novel explores Billy's search for meaning in this materialistic and hollow world.