The Great Derangement Essay Questions

What are the reactions, behaviors, and perceptions of humans in relation to the subject of climate change?

Amitav Ghosh explicitly discusses the behaviors of humans with respect to climate change. Ghosh says that most people in some parts of the Asian content view climate change as an ideology forged by the Americans as well as the European countries—a propaganda. Additionally, Ghosh says that humans tend to only focus on the time during their lifespan and, as such, have neglected the effects and threat posed by the impending climate change on future generations. Also, they often tend to be ignorant of their selfish actions. Besides, Ghosh says that the inability of humans to comprehend the threat presented by climate change is likely to result in negative impacts on future generations if no action is taken to curb the situation and find solutions.

Why does Ghosh find it so necessary that fiction writers address the climate crisis?

Ghosh doesn't exempt governments or businesses or even regular people from their responsibility to acknowledge the climate crisis, but he does suggest that fiction writers have an important role to play. We all need to "find a way out of the individualizing imagunary in which we are trapped," and artists and writers are the the ones whose job is "imagining possibilities, [which] is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats" (135).

Who is Ghosh's audience?

These essays grew from speeches given at a university, and now collected into a book they ostensibly should have a wider audience. Yet critic Ericka Hoagland suggests that a problem of this text is readership: "Ghosh’s observations are invaluable but also rather esoteric, suggesting that the readers of this text are limited to academic circles that are already likely to agree with his assessments." Indeed, ruminations on the development of the modern novel and the uncanny are probably not going to be effective in altering governments' action or businesses' pollution. This does not mean Ghosh's work is unimportant or irrelevant, but that it is unlikely to have a larger impact.

Why did the cyclone Ghosh witnessed affect him so strongly, yet prove impossible to write about?

Ghosh was caught in a cyclone in New Delhi, a phenomenon that was, by all accounts, unlikely. He felt profoundly jarred and affected by it, but even though it was a remarkable experience he could not translate it into his writing. It was to bizarre, too improbable; the scene he found himself in would seem to be a "contrivance of last resort" (16). He realizes this inability to take an event he personally experienced, a veritable "mother lode, a gift to be mined to the last nugget" (15), and put it into his fiction was a result of the modern novel's excising of everything that was fantastical in favor of the mundane—"the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background...while the everyday moves into the foreground" (17).

What does Ghosh mean by the "nonhuman," and how would an encounter with such a thing change us?

The first example Ghosh gives of the nonhuman is the tiger that haunts the Sundarbans, regarding humans with mute, implacable power. When a human knows it is being observed and then turns to the observer, there is a connection, but not one that feels "normal" or comprehensible. Instead, there is the feeling of the uncanny—that something is almost right but actually wrong, that the familiar has been skewed, that there is something ineffable. Confronting the nonhuman—animals, Nature, weather—is what allows us to untether ourselves from our deeply problematic anthropocentrism.