Comparing Picaresque Elements in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and F. Sionil Jose’s Mass

The colonial era of the past five hundred years, as instigated by European powers, eventually enabled the appropriation of canonically Western literary forms by writers from formerly colonized regions of the world. A concrete example of this is the picaresque novel, which originated in sixteenth-century Spain as a satirical mode aimed at the prevailing social norms and glaring inequalities of a time when that country was at the forefront of reaping wealth from newly established colonies in the Americas. In recent decades, postcolonial writers have utilized the pícaro, or elements thereof, as a means of shedding light on the many questions that come with hailing from a milieu that is still, for the most part, economically and culturally disadvantaged in the current global order (hence, the emergence of the term postcolonial picaresque). By way of a comparative method with Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel The White Tiger, this paper articulates how Pepe Samson, from F. Sionil Jose’s Mass, meets the standards of cunning, marginality, moral ambiguity, and social stigmatization that set apart the pícaro from other narrator-protagonists. In effect, one may argue that both novels could serve as models for postcolonial writers aspiring to work in or draw inspiration from the picaresque mode. In “mimicking” such tropes, these writers could potentially interrogate or critique neocolonial dynamics and divides and thus formulate alternative cultural or narrative streams beyond the imaginings of the usually Global North-based metropoles.