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Explanation and Analysis:
Mukherjee’s writing style in “The Management of Grief” is minimalist and fragmented, two qualities that are meant to capture the narrator Shaila's grief over losing her husband and two sons in a terrorist attack. The following passage—which comes as Shaila is in Irelend to try to identify her family members’ bodies—captures these qualities of Mukherjee’s style:
My sons, though four years apart, were very close. Vinod wouldn’t let Mithun drown. Electrical engineering, I think, foolishly perhaps: this man knows important secrets of the universe, things closed to me. Relief spins me lightheaded. No wonder my boys’ photographs haven’t turned up in the gallery of photos of the recovered dead. “Such pretty roses,” I say.
In this passage, Shaila processes several things at once in a disjointed and disorienting way. The passage opens with her thinking of her two sons, then abruptly moves to her recalling that Dr. Ranganathan—another person who is there to identify his relatives’ bodies—works in electrical engineering and therefore may be correct in his assessment that her children could have survived the plane crash by swimming to safety. After “relief spins [Shaila] lightheaded,” she thinks once more of her children possibly being alive before abruptly telling Dr. Ranganathan that he has “such pretty roses.”
It is significant that Mukherjee doesn’t explain or connect the jumps that Shaila is making in her mind, she lets them exist as fragments that are meant to confuse and disorient readers, mirroring the confusion and disorientation that Shaila is experiencing due to her grief. While she feels “relief” for a moment in this passage, her brain is still not functioning in a normal way, and she shifts between random thoughts, images, and phrases. The minimalism here, or short sentences and simple word choices, also capture the numbness she is experiencing in this moment.
Related Themes:
