Cliffhanger Narrative: Storytelling And Web Pattern In Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth And Pouring Rain

Abstract

Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through cliffhanger writing techniques inspired from the Indian story telling tradition. In Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, digressive storytelling that reflects oral patterns merges with structural strategies rived from the web pattern and hypertext. The author’s creation of an online storytelling community that gives him email feedback on his writing mimics the tradition of storytelling in a way that responds to hyper textual interactivity. The implied audience emerges from the work of a whole community rather than of an individual narrator. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a modern version of Arabian Nights, filled in by well-told tale meant to earn the protagonist’s endurance. Throughout the novel it focuses on individual develop and makes statements about society at specific historical movements, based on factual observation. The presence of myth-based traditional storytelling, digressions and ponderings on the meanings of events, in a discourse matters is the endless storytelling process that much keep growing like a serial.