Something that caught my attention while reading this piece is the sincerity and earnestness about love and human connection in this novel. This is something we see with Ben and his relationships primarily with women— his interactions with them. Ben’s relationship with Alex in particular is debatable. 

This constant mention of Alex hoping to carry Ben’s baby to me was strange and seemed to be a huge piece of this novel/ journey. 

“Why didn’t Mom just adopt?” (pg. 120— ebook)

The thought of Ben being the father had crossed my mind as well- why was it so critical to Alex that Ben was the father?

“I can’t imagine what any of this must have felt like, must feel like,” I said. I wanted to say that it’s not the sperm donor that matters, that the real father is the man who loved and raised her, but before I could figure out how to articulate my position tactfully, I was distracted by a vision of Alex in the future, falling in love with someone, maybe moving out of the city with “our” child. Would I be thought of as the father? Just a donor? Not at all?” (pg. 120— ebook) 

The way this particular part of the novel was written, it seemed as if Ben almost second-guessed his decision at this point in the story. In my opinion, this is when the realization started to hit him when he was having the conversation with the coworker and came to realize that this isn’t just about sperm donation- this is more than that- what is my position in all this? When it comes to being a sperm donor, what do I want and what do I not want?

“She shrugged. “I think on balance I didn’t want kids anyway. Do you have children?”

“No, but my best friend wants me to help her get pregnant. I mean, we’re thinking of doing IUI. But”—and this was certainly only sayable because of the wine—“my sperm is a little abnormal.” (pg. 157— ebook)

Time and time again, we hear that this is something that his best friend is interested in, but what about what he wants as well? In the course of reading the novel, I kept thinking about one thing: why him?

“Okay, but your whole plan only kind of involves me—my level of involvement to be determined, whether I’m a donor or a father. You’re asking me to be a flickering presence. I give reproductive cells and then the rest we figure out as we go along.” (pg. 177— ebook)

I can tell you exactly what I was thinking-Alex gets what she wants, which is a baby from Ben, but what does Ben get in return? There is something unusual about Ben’s correspondence with women.

JERRY PHILLIPS; The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Novel 1 November 2002; 35 (2-3): 299–311.

Melzer, Patricia. “”All that You Touch You Change”: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Femspec 3.2 (2002): 31. ProQuest. 17 Nov. 2022 .

McCormack, Michael Brandon. “‘Your God Is a Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, and a Misogynist … Our God Is Change’: Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler and Afrofuturist Critiques of (Black) American Religion.” Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14769948.2015.1131503.

Jos, Philip H. “Fear and the Spiritual Realism of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed.” Utopian Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2012, pp. 408–429., https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.23.2.0408.

Achachelooei, Elham Mohammadi, and Carol Elizabeth Leon. “The Past and ‘Discontinuity in Religion’ in Octavia Butler’s Parables: a Feminist Theological Perspective.” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 68, no. 2, 2021, pp. 120–137., doi:10.1080/20512856.2021.1935492.

In order to find my sources I used Hunter One, JSTOR, and Google Scholar. I also found a source on the open bibliography. At first I was sticking to seeking out articles titled with phrases related to religion (my research question). I used keywords such as religion, role, spiritualism, earthseed, along with the title of the novel or “Butler”. I found many articles discussing neo liberalism, feminism, etc in the novel. When I was closing myself off to looking at articles titled something directly related to the theme of religion I found it difficult to acquire sources and this narrowed my search. I started looking into different articles despite the title implying the central theme of discussion was unrelated to religion, and to my surprise found that these sources did in fact make some interesting points that I could use in a paper. Not all but several of these discuss the role of religion in Parable, possible shaping factors of Earthseed, and then later discuss how religion intersects with the main theme they are critiquing or discussing, whether it be neo liberalism, race, feminism, etc. I realized that these could actually be valid points of information as well and could help expand on the discussion in the paper more, making it more multidimensional. I mainly used recent sources, the oldest being from 2002 and more recent ones from the last couple of years.

Since my paper is going to be about imagery and the role it plays in Ghosh’s Hungry Tides, the following is the bibliography to this point:

“Amitav Ghosh Where Is the Fiction about Climate Change.” www.theguardian.com, October 28, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/amitav-ghosh-where-is-the-fiction-about-climate-change.

How does realism in scientific fiction help us better understand the consequences of our role in the Anthropocene?

Chakravarty, Urjani. “Exploring Literary Multilingualism in Indian Diasporic Writing.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 528+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A580598784/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=0a536cc3. Accessed 19 Nov. 2022.

Chaudhuri, Supriya. “Translating Loss: Place and Language in Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie”, Études anglaises, vol. 62, no. 3, 2009, pp. 266-279.

Grin, F. “The Economics of Language: Match or Mismatch?” International Political Science Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 1994, pp. 25–42. https://doi-org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/10.1177/019251219401500103

Sen, Krishna, and Rituparna Roy, editors. “Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010”. Amsterdam University Press, 2013. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kd51. Accessed 19 Nov. 2022.

Tasnim, Zakiyah. “Transformation of English Language in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2018, pp. 145-150. ProQuest, http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/transformation-english-language-amitav-ghosh-s/docview/2188079590/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.3p.145.

I used many different websites to search for literary criticisms and other related scholarly articles. First I tried narrowing my research questions into a few keywords such as “language”, “communication” and the title of the novel itself, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. I then put those keywords into the advanced Hunter College one search to gain an idea about what the discussions are in most of the published articles regarding Ghosh’s novel. I then found two sources, one article through JSTOR and one ebook on ProQuest, containing an analysis of language in the novel, specifically why Ghosh wrote the novel in English when it is portrayed as being different languages such as Bengali or Hindu. I also browsed SAGE journals to find an article that discussed language more closely and in different contexts.