A Comparative Study of Narrative Voice as Power in The White Tiger and Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

This paper argues that narrative voice, and not theme alone, is where Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) stage their arguments about poverty and power. Existing scholarship on both novels has documented their treatment of class division, corruption, and historical trauma in rich detail, but has largely treated narration as a transparent window onto these themes rather than as a mechanism of power. Reading Balram Halwai's unbroken confessional monologue alongside Adichie’s three-way focalization through Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard, this study shows that Adiga's single rising voice formally reproduces the exclusionary logic of the Rooster Coop it condemns. At the same time, Adichie's plural narration distributes authority more widely, even granting authorship to a former servant, without fully equalizing that authority across gender. Bringing narratological readings of each novel into direct comparison, the paper contends that both texts use the architecture of who speaks to decide questions of poverty and power well before their plots resolve them.