Demystifying Ambiguity: A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Chinese Premier in The White Tiger

Abstract Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (HarperCollins, 2008) frames its narrative as a sequence of late-night letters addressed to the Chinese Premier. This epistolary structure generates a distinctive field of ambiguity in which confession, instruction, irony, and self-exoneration operate simultaneously. Existing criticism has read the novel variously as satire, social exposé, or neoliberal fable, but it has often treated the letter as a stylistic container rather than as a discursive mechanism that actively shapes ethics and authority. This essay argues that the addressee functions as a discursive construct—silent witness, global proxy, and rhetorical alibi—through whom Balram Halwai converts criminal disclosure into narrative control. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and narratological attention to address and voice, the study undertakes micro-analyses of pronoun positioning, evaluative lexis, justificatory rhetoric, and tonal switching in the opening sections of the letter. It demonstrates how Balram’s “confession” is staged without repentance, how flattery and insult coexist as audience-design strategies, and how the reader is positioned as an overhearer compelled into ethical oscillation. The essay ultimately reframes Balram not as a stable moral type—victim, rebel, or monster—but as a discursively self-fashioning subject whose authority depends on sustaining ambiguity rather than resolving it. Keywords epistolary narration; critical discourse analysis; narrative ethics; neoliberal subjectivity; address; Indian English fiction; ambiguity