A Symbolic Deconstructed Colonialism in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Abstract

Unlike the title of the novel, A Passage to India, which is an allusion to one of Walt Whitman's poems, here we see the disillusionment of Romanticism. Novel depicts "everything exists, but nothing has values" (Forster, 1985, p.147), the same as the dark discovery in the Marabar Caves. The novel suggests that we must have a passage through the national barriers, and all human beings should become one nation. However, up to end of the novel, we see each time such possibility of oneness is admitted, but due to the so-called deficiencies or malfunctions of the Indians it is immediately denied; the novel leaves us frustrated that such a unity is never established completely. Despite Walt Whitman's view, this passage through the national barriers is not possible. The present study aims to depict a symbolic deconstructed colonialism on Forster's A Passage to India. As a result, the most important question which was posed at the very beginning of the novel, "Can the English and the Indians become friends or not?" is not answered clearly. Each time we begin to admit an opportunity of integration and unity, this chance is immediately delayed or harshly denied. The novel implicitly depicts the three phases of the Hegelian paradigm: thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis.