The purpose of this paper is to analyse the theme of alienation in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Home Fire. Since Shamsie writes about the difficulties of assimilating to a foreign country with its own culture and beliefs, her works in some ways mirror her own diasporic experience as an immigrant. Readers can get a glimpse of immigrant life and the on-going struggle between the home country and the foreign nation through these novels.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) is often discussed through Humbert Humbert’s unreliable narration and the controversial representation of Dolores Haze. A closer examination reveals that the novel’s silenced and marginalised characters provide alternative perspectives that destabilise Humbert’s dominant voice. Charlotte Haze, Clare Quilty, Gaston Godin, and other peripheral characters function as narrative counterpoints, exposing the limitations of Humbert’s self-serving account.

Caste practices dates back to Vedic period. Having placed the practices as traditional, it takes a static stature in India. Even when it is earmarked as a social construct, caste, today governs political schemas. Structured caste hierarchy determines the ideologies of communities. The inclusion or exclusion of a community is a political act. In an effort to build dalit consciousness, dalit icons from oral and folk narratives have been reinventing minor characters. Re-readings questioned and ruptured the dominance of brahmanic narrative. A methodical deciphering renders the fidget of power.

Samuel Beckett’s widely acclaimed play Waiting for Godot (1952) is typically interpreted as an absurdist play with an examination of existential meaninglessness and futility of human life. My paper attempts to interpret it through the framework of economic precariat and precarity and post-catastrophic survival, drawing on the theory of Guy Standing established in The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class and discussed by James McNaughton’s Samuel Beckett and The politics of aftermath.