Structural and Coherence Analysis Towards The Renunciation

While many researchers have paid attention to Rabindranath Tagore's poems, few have analyzed his short stories, still less on a specific story, like The Renunciation. The fiction critiques the caste system of Hinduism and portrays a unique female character. This paper proposes that structural and coherence analysis can assist in a better appreciation of the story. The disruption of the timeline emphasizes the importance of a series of events occurred in the past. Coherence relations within them are established and analyzed so that the caste system's role as the origin of perpetuating tragedy among Hindus is explicitly revealed. The blank in the timeline along with the nightingale which appears throughout the novel indicates the plight of women in Hindu society. Analyses in this paper provide argumentation for views proposed in previous studies, namely Tagore's firm stance against the caste system and his empathy for suffering women, from a new angle. It also demonstrates the feasibility of linguistic theories appliance to the field of literary criticism.