"EXISTENTIAL ANGST AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN ANITA DESAI’ S PROTAGONISTS"

Abstract

This paper will discuss how the existential angst is reflected, as well as how the heroines of the novels by Anita Desai seek their identity. The interiority, psychological fragmentation, alienation, the conflict of personal desire and social-cultural expectations are some of the things predicted by Desai in his fiction. The research also examines how isolation, anxiety and identity crisis of the protagonists of Desai are realized in the lives of the protagonists in the book, through a close textual analysis of his selected novels namely Cry, the Peacock, Fire on the Mountain and Clear Light of Day, in the context of patriarchal, familial, and postcolonial Indian life. The study places the narrative strategies of Desai in the context of existential thinking but touches on the Indian socio-cultural context of the dilemma of her characters. The paper states that existential angst in fiction by Desai is not only philosophical but it is highly embedded with gendered oppression, memory, displacement and emotional estrangement. In the final analysis, the identity of the main characters seeking an identity is a form of wider comment in the contemporary Indian subjectivity and the unsteady self in a fast-changing society.