Narrative Failure and Ecological Crisis: Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement in Postcolonial and Ecocritical Perspective

Abstract

This paper explores the argument advanced by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement that the conventions of literary realism are inherently ill-suited to representing the large-scale and unpredictable phenomena of climate change. The study analyzes Ghosh’s claims across the book’s three sections—Stories, History, and Politics—situating them within the broader contexts of ecocriticism and postcolonial environmental thought. It draws on concepts such as Nixon’s notion of slow violence, Chakrabarty’s theses on the climate of history, and Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, while also examining how Ghosh’s own fiction, The Hungry Tide and Gun Island, attempts to enact the principles outlined in his critique. The paper contends that Ghosh’s most significant contribution lies not only in his literary diagnosis but in his insistence on linking environmental catastrophe to the legacies of colonialism and capitalism, a connection that much Western ecocriticism has been slow to acknowledge.