Writing in My Days (1975)1 about his early short stories, R.K. Narayan explained that he &dquo;wished to attack the tyranny of Love and see if life could offer other values than the inevitable Man-Woman relationship to a writer&dquo;. In order to do this he found &dquo;themes centering around a moment or a mood with a crisis&dquo;. Really there isn't anything very remarkable about a short-story writer claiming either of these things as an ambition. The fact that Narayan claims them might go some way towards explaining why his stories have so frequently, and inexactly, been compared with Chekhov's.Contrary to the received wisdom, however, not much of Narayan's best writing is in the short-story form, and in his novels and novellas the &dquo;ManWoman relationship&dquo; remains a significant presence. Nor do the themes of his longer fictions usually centre around a moment or a mood with a crisis.Instead, there are many moments which appear to be crucial, but which soon transpire to be something both more and less than that. It might be truer to say that in Narayan's longer fiction a whole life tends to be characterized as being prone to crisis, but the dramatic incidents that might have been expected to constitute the crisis at any particular moment in that life confirm a predisposition rather than present a challenge to it. Of course, the character concerned might not have realized what it was to which he was predisposed, and therefore recognition might in itself constitute a psychological or moral crisis. Also, the plots of the novels often look as if they are leading from and towards crises that take a dramatic form. But one senses that there is a mismatch, a slither, between the apparent and the real value attaching to many of the incidents described. At the time, it seems to the reader and the character as if something important, even crucial, is happening. Then, with hindsight, they both realize it was nothing of the sort, nothing that changes things in any significant or fundamental way.
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