A Horse and Two Goats: A Culture Clash
...write in English. Humor is used effectively in this piece. The narrative style has the most effect on this aspect. Omniscient, yet far from judgmental, the narrator makes light of the characters’ predicament rather than criticizing it. It is through this style that Narayan is successfully able to control the focus, tone and attitude throughout the piece. Narayan creates a soothing effect with his modest vocabulary; his writing lacks the biased slant that can so easily become a part of the story’s message. They [the words] tell it like it is, rather than try to persuade the reader to believe one thing or another. The two main characters in this story couldn’t be more different: Muni is poor, rural, uneducated, and dark-skinned; the American is wealthy, urban, educated, and white. Living shortly after India gained its independence from colonial rule, the character of Muni seems to have been absent when they were handing out the benefits from this transition. In fact, things haven’t changed much at all for him. He’s still poor, he’s still low in the caste system, and he still cowers when the white man wearing khaki approaches him, a man he assumes must be a British authority figure. Without the means to do otherwise, Muni calmly accepts the life that he has been given, while the American is willing and able to change his life at the drop of a hat. The American just decides one day to fly off to India. Once there, he chooses to throw some money around and buy a piece of Indian history. Then he decides to then throws his return ticket out so as to accompany his souvenir on a ship back to America. Each man is quite ignorant of the other’s way of life. The American takes for granted his relative wealth and seems unaware of the difference between Muni and himself. He casually offers cigarettes to a man who has seen but one, he complains about a four-hour stretch without air conditioning to a man who has never had electricity, and brags about enjoying manual labor as a Sunday hobby to a man who grew up working in the fields from morning until night. “A Horse and Two Goats” also touches on the different ways that a person can receive an education. Muni, who grew up a member of a lower caste at a time when only the Brahmin, the highest caste, could attend school, has had no formal education. He has not traveled beyond his village, and he likes to watch trucks and buses go by on the highway a few miles away so that he can have “a sense of belonging to a larger world” (Narayan, 789), more specifically, the Western world. The American, on the other hand, has had the full opportunity to receive an outstanding education (he had the opportunity; whether or not he took advantage of it is another question). He has a roomful of books that he values as material belongings, rather than the substance within them. “You know I love books and am a member of five book clubs, and the choice and bonus volumes mount up to a pile in our living room” (Narayan, 793). There is no evidence that he understands what is hel...