Collective suffering and the possibility of empathy in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

This article argues that Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss depart from conventional literary representations of the suffering of neoliberal subjects because they focus on collective rather than individual experiences of abjection. Emphasizing the breakdown in state services, the rise in insurgent groups, and the monetization of human life, the novels consider the possibility of empathy in a society structured by self-preoccupation and extreme inequality. The article compares how the two novels imagine coping with the condition of abjection, and focuses on their shared narrative technique of free indirect discourse as a means of encouraging empathy with characters