Analyse af Shashi Deshpandes novelle 'The Dark'

Shashi Deshpande is a famous Indian author, who was born in Karnataka in 1938. In her long career as a writer, she has written essays on literature, feminism and translations from Indian to English.

The story tells us about a young Indian girl, who gets kidnapped and sexually abused by an unknown man. After some time, the girl is found and brought back to her parents – but not as the same daughter, they last saw her as. Now she’s just in some kind of trance and is fixating on one particularly spot in the ceiling over her bed.

Wearing school clothes, as the girl, in India can be intimidating for some men, because if women were supposed to go to school and later work, who would stay home and take care of the family? When she was found, she didn’t have any of her school clothes on, but instead she had traditionally Indian women’s garments on – maybe her abductor had forced her to change clothes.

The story is written from the mother’s perspective, which makes it a first-person limited narrator, and the choice of narrator makes the story a little mystical, because we don’t get to follow the girl’s thoughts about this situation.