The Great Derangement Literary Elements

Nonfiction

The book has a global focus and thinks through phenomena of the past, present, and future.

The text is told from the first-person perspective of the author, Amitav Ghosh.

Tone: straightforward, speculative, mournful, incredulous, solemn

Mood: ominous, serious, apprehensive

This is a non-fiction book so there are no clear protagonists and antagonists.

The major conflict of this text is Ghosh's effort to convince his readers of the urgency of climate change.

The climax of the text occurs when Ghosh writes about the potential for political instability as a result of climate change and the unfair distribution of wealth.

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The text is notably lacking in understatement, as Ghosh strives to convince his audience of the severity of the climate change crisis. He does, however, critique other writings on climate change for their use of too much understatement. From an article about the Indian Ocean that Ghosh finds "chilling in their understatement": "These results will motivate a reappraisal of the seismic and tsunami hazard assessment in the NW Indian Ocean" (40).

1. "Star Wars," the beloved blockbuster film of 1977
2. "James Dean and Peter Fonda racing toward the horizon" (10) references the film "Easy Rider"
3. "the Borgesian task" (23) refers to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges
4. A Pandora's box (38) is a reference to the Greek myth where Pandora opened a box that contained all the misery and suffering of the world
5. Ghosh uses the phrase "that exactly is the rub" (48), a riff on a famous phrase from Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
6. Ghosh calls Piddington "one of the first Cassandras of climate science," (58), a reference to the Greek woman who could see the future
7. Thoreau's phrase "vast, Titanic, inhuman nature" (63) comes from the writer's climbing of Mt. Katahdin

Ghosh uses powerful imagery of natural and unnatural phenomena, sites, and spaces (like the cyclone, cities on the edge of the sea, the Sundarbans, etc.) to illustrate the impact humans have had on the environment and to show us what perilous things will no doubt happen very soon if serious steps are not taken.

In reference to which has primacy in the real world – predictable processes or unlikely events – "Gould's response is 'the only possible answer can be 'both and neither.'"

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"The reality is that 'growth' in many coastal cities around the world now depends on ensuring that a blind eye is turned toward risk" (48)

1. "the energy that surrounds us...is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing" (5)
2. "the tornado's eye had passed directly over me" (14)
3. "The trouble, however, is that Nature does certainly jump, if not leap." (20)
4. "The bosom of Bengal is draped with rivers and their tributaries, twisted and intertwined like tangled locks" (60)
5. "The appetites of the British economy needed to be fed by large quantities of raw materials" (107)