ABSTRACT
In an interview with Bill Moyers, Bharati Mukherjee offers her view of immigrant attitudes and thus insight into the literature of immigration. A distinguishing trait of postcolonial fiction is the introduction of new linguistic elements and sociopolitical critique into the literature of a dominant culture. The literature of the dominant culture generally deails subtly with such small crises in terms of a single cultural code. Literature of immigration, however, is a variant of postcolonial literature, which complicates the reader's task by introducing multiple cultural codes. Perceived in this way, as counterpoint to sequential elements of narrative, Mukherjee's sociopolitical critique becomes essential to the startling turns of plot in Wife and Jasmine, which might at first be taken as inept writing. The earlier theory, collected in Image-Music-Text, will serve for an analysis of Wife, using the notion of indices as they integrate with higher levels of action and narration to generate a system of narrative.
