AUTHOR(S)
Anik Biswas
ABSTRACT
Lokenath Bhattacharya’s The Virgin Fish of Babughat is explicitly a complex novel that allegorically shows how human beings are entrapped by an inconspicuous but unavoidable force. The story of the novel invites many interpretations but the narrator who is a prisoner in a nameless detention camp resembles the trapped life of human beings. Unfortunately, what happens in the world is that human beings become a part of the system of dehumanizing themselves consciously or subconsciously with the influence of a ‘force’. This ‘force’ may be a social mechanism or anything but at one stage of life, everyone feels the urge for emancipation whether he/ she can attain it or not. The novelconnects the absurd literature like Waiting for Godot which also deals with the ‘trap’ of human beings. Estragon, Vladimir in Waiting for Godot and Aparesh, and Chandrima in The Virgin Fish of Babughat meet a similar fate and it is ‘waiting’ for the uncertainty. But what is more in The Virgin Fish of Babughat is an urge of emancipation reflected by Aparesh and Chandrima. This paper aims at showing how the narrator becomes the representative of entrapped human beings on the earth including different discourses of freedom.