A Defamiliarized Study of Saikat Majumdar's Novel The Firebird

Any artistic creation is the result of the artist’s imagination, efforts and hard work. What attracts our attention about any art work is its novelty and distinctiveness. To bring these characteristic into the work of art, many artistic devices have been developed. Defamiliarization is one such literary technique, particularly used in literature to make it novel, vivid, artistic, impressive and more appealing to the reader. It gives way to the conventional mode of ordinary writing. Saikat Majumdar is a renowned novelist, critic, academic scholar, educationist and columnist of post-millennial era, who with his writing has left an indelible impression upon his readers. His works are praised for his intrinsic writing style, narrative structure, figurative language and rhythm. For this, he has made ample use of ‘defamiliarization’ technique introduced by Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky in 1917. The present research paper is based on his use of defamiliarization technique in his second novel ‘The Firebird’ (2015). In the present paper, the researcher is going to explore the characteristics of defamiliarization technique and its implementation by the author in the text of the novel to make it remarkable.