How does Ali present Nazneen and Chanu’s marriage in the novel Brick Lane?
Ali presents Nazneen as an uncritical character at the start of the novel. She is uncritical of her husband, her home and the environment around her. Ali uses the cluttered room where Nazneen lives as a way to show this. It is presented as a metaphor for her marriage and also her state of mind. It becomes even more cluttered over the course of the novel. When she first arrives in England she is proud of everything in her home: “Nobody in Gouripor had anything like it. It made her proud.” However as the novel progresses she becomes more perceptive to the flaws of her husband and everything surrounding her and Ali uses the room to show this: “Chanu’s books and papers grew like weeds. And the dust – it came from nowhere, like a plague, and it could not be cured.” The use of words such as ‘weeds’ and ‘plague’ show her annoyance at her husband and the clutter around her.
The novel is told through Nazneen’s eyes. The reader is told everything that Nazneen thinks, says and does through her inner monologue and she is the only character Ali chooses to do this with. To the very end of the novel the reader stay inside her head. It is only her feelings about her marriage that the reader is made aware of. This commits Ali to a difficult trick of characterisation with her husband: bringing Chanu alive from the outside. Chanu begins as someone the reader is invited to resent. His marriage to Nazneen has been arranged, and she does not know him before she becomes his wife. He has been foisted on her and also the reader and Ali gives both plenty of reasons for both to be irked by him. He is self-important; "rolls of fat" hang low from his stomach; he lectures his children; he makes his wife cut his corns. He lives partly in "his own private world of theory and refutation, striving and puzzlement". His sense