The Ramayana Themes

The Ramayana tells the story of Rama, a man who is an avatar (incarnation) of the Hindu god Vishnu. As such, Rama possesses all of Vishnu's godly qualities in the body of a man, and is therefore meant to represent an image of the ideal man according to Hindu philosophy. As the characters travel through the text, interacting with other honorable characters as well as less-ideal characters, the text seeks to discover what…

The characters in the Ramayana place a great deal of importance on honor, loyalty, and behaving dutifully to their family members. Honor and loyalty control every character in the story, humans as well as the demons and the gods. Even though honoring one's promises and behaving loyally often has disastrous short-term consequences for the characters, they overwhelmingly choose to follow through with their promises, which later result in long-term success. This suggests that though behaving…

This edition of the Ramayana makes it very clear that the story has been condensed into an abridged, prose version of the original Ramayana, which consists of over ten thousand stanzas of poetry. Further, Narayan draws his story from a Tamil version of the Ramayana by the medieval poet Kamban, who in turn created his version from the original Sanskrit version by Valmiki. Because of this, it's made very clear by its structure and…