AN ECO-CRITICAL STUDY OF VIKRAM SETH’S ARION AND THE DOLPHIN

Arion and the Dolphin contains all the qualities that have been recommended for representing an eco-critical text, well mounting the Deep Ecology principles formulated by Arne Naess (Norwegian) and George Sessions (American) (qtd. in Tosic 46). Buell identifies how Fletcher’s environment-poetic recognizes more explicitly how the social landscape figures as a part of total landscape (51). According to Fletcher’s theory of the environment poem, Buell explains that the poem itself is to be taken as a world. Buell points out: “Fletcher posits, over-anxiously perhaps, an anthropocentric imperative... with two notable stipulations....First, ‘the poetry will express the mere existence of those creatures who belong or do not belong’; and second, it ‘will show how this belonging occurs... the least creatures among the flora and fauna...’ (50). The long poem celebrates the coexistence of man and nature in its initial stages, when Arion is surrounded by aquatic creatures after they have rescued him from being drowned by his enemies. It is the ideal state of man and nature being one entity. The tragic end of the poem with the death of the dolphin also presents an eco-critical view in that the separation of man from his identity with nature as represented by the separation of Arion from the dolphin due to his imprisonment and also the utter incapacity of the people of Corinth to form any bond with the dolphin show the need of the hour that man has to be one with nature in order for peace, happiness, harmony and balance in the world as a whole to prevail.