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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.78 No. pp.165-176
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2025.78.165

Narratives of Trauma and Resistance: A Comparative Study of Han Kang and Arundhati Roy

M. Kumaran, A.G Nihal Basha
Assistant Professor in Jamal Mohamed College, Affiliated to Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli, India
Associate Professor of English working in Jamal Mohamed College, Affiliated to Bharathidasan University

Abstract

This paper undertakes a comparative literary analysis of South Korean writer Han Kang and Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, focusing on how trauma, resistance, and identity are represented in their respective cultural and socio-political contexts. Drawing upon Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) and Human Acts (2014), alongside Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), the study examines how both authors employ the human body, fragmented memory, and experimental narrative forms as critical tools to confront systemic oppression and personal anguish. Through a close reading of these texts, the paper explores the ways in which corporeality becomes a site of resistance, memory becomes a repository of political history, and silence transforms into a form of subversive speech. While their aesthetic strategies diverge—Kang often invoking stark minimalism and allegorical surrealism, and Roy favoring lush prose and political satire—both writers share a profound commitment to amplifying marginalized voices and exposing the complicity of institutions in sustaining violence. In doing so, their works not only offer poignant critiques of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and social exclusion but also imagine alternative modes of being and belonging through literary innovation.

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