Arun Joshi is the most outstandingly sensitive and thought- provoking novelist who has addressed alienation and annihilation of modern man. The novels of Joshi are branded as the theme dealing with fretfulness, alienation and the existential predicament of contemporary man. The central characters of Joshi’s novels are mentally disturbed and filled with despair, self-hatred and self-pity and regard themselves as strangers in this lonely planet.The concept of alienation is not quite new in the modern world it has been in use in the theological, philosophical, sociological and psychological writings for an extensive while. Alienation means withdrawal, a person removes himself from contact with other people and is alone with his own thoughts. The withdrawal leads to severe maladjustments and gradually expresses more painful and suppresses all emotions and results. This creates a rift in the personality that routes to destruction and leaves a scar in the individual. The twentieth century has rightly called the age of alienation, an age of lost values, lost men and lost gods, where man is confused, frustrated, disintegrated and an alienated soul. The massive amount of alienation is highlighted in modern India among the youth and the artists who wrote in post-independence era. Joshi’s fiction explores the self-alienation and brings to central focus the way in which the self has to assess its alienation from the family and society. The protagonists of Joshi’s novels are abject outsiders and barren strangers who live in a bewildered statement and have brought the poignant contests of alienation in his fiction leading the protagonists to an existential choice. Broadly speaking, alienation implies division from family, group, society and even from own self.

Author Name: Mr. N. Venugopal & Dr. D. Anand Kumar

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Keywords: Alienation from Self, Society, and Humanity

ISSN: 2321-7065

EISSN: 2321-7065

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