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Foreshadowing
Frame Story
Explanation and Analysis—My Life's Story:
Part of The White Tiger’s clever narrative style owes to its sprawling frame story structure. Balram offers his life story to Jiabao in the first pages, supposedly as a gesture of solidarity that shows the “truth about Bangalore.” Accordingly, The White Tiger organizes itself around the nightly installments of Balram’s personal narrative. What follows is a real-time narrator who retells his past, a story subtly embedded within another.
Balram’s extensive, sometimes circuitous story—his childhood in Laxmangarh, move to Dhanbad and then to Delhi—almost fills up the entirety of the novel. But the novel’s frame story conceit creates a strong meta-fictional element as well. Balram breaks the fourth wall in addressing Jiabao and—by extension—the reader. Since Balram narrates his life, part of this story also gets written as he shares it with the reader. Reality intrudes, even while he tells it. Mohammad Asif’s car accident interrupts his story in Chapter 5. “Alas: I’ll have to stop this story for a while. It’s only 1:32 in the morning, but we’ll have to break off here. Something has come up, sir—an emergency,” Balram explains. The reader finds out about the “emergency” only in Chapter 8, when his handling of the incident provides a fitting, full-circle conclusion to the novel. By using the novel’s space to narrate his past, Balram situates himself as both a character within the narrative and a crafty storyteller.
