Comparative Essay Between the Bats and Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs (Arranged Marriage by Divakaruni)

Arranged Marriage Comparative Essay
“The Bats” + “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs”

In both “The Bats” and “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs”, Divakaruni constructs layered and vulnerable female characters that are inevitably confronted by family conflict that forces them to grow up.   With differing styles of narrative perspective, Divakaruni takes the narrative approach in The Bats, and the readers are taken through the story with the explicit category of motifs that is bats, whereas the technique used in SP, GR is more descriptive with an arbitrary approach as the motifs are scattered around, challenging the reader to piece them together.   However, the juxtaposition of motifs in both stories leads up to one defining topic: maturity, thereby enabling the reader to understand the common internal family conflict that ironically moulds the characters into emotional maturity.

With the first narrative perspective, Divakaruni uses the different techniques of motif placement that eventually demonstrate the similar emotional transitions undergone by the narrators of the two stories.   In both “The Bats“ and “SP, GR”, the stories take off with a random start and there is a lack of structured motifs.   The title of the first short story, “The Bats” has the reader wondering where the motif bats will come in and Divakaruni commences “SP, GR” too with an apparent lack of an arrangement of motifs, but with a twist of keeping the scatter of motifs throughout the story.   The first person narrative perspective is extremely descriptive and the reader is left speculating on the various motifs.  

There is however, an unmistakable gradual change in the narrative approach in “The Bats” when Divakaruni shifts from a completely unstructured frame to a linear configuration of the motif bats.   When the narrator sees her grandpa-uncle’s orchard there is the first connection with bats, as illustrated here, “I had been helping Grandpa-uncle with the bats” (7) and Divakaruni uses the...