Narrative Failures and Environmental Ethics: A Postcolonial Reading of Climate Change in The Great Derangement

This paper examines how Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement reframes climate change as a failure of culture, ethics, and narrative form rather than only a scientific or policy problem. It argues that modern literary realism, shaped by colonial history and capitalist logic, struggles to represent the scale, agency, and uncertainty of planetary change. Through a postcolonial ecocritical lens, the study shows how Ghosh links the limits of storytelling to the longer histories of empire, extraction, and environmental injustice. The analysis draws on key debates in postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental humanities, and narrative theory to situate Ghosh’s work within a broader scholarly effort to rethink how literature can engage with nonhuman agency and deep time. By reviewing recent research on climate fiction and experimental narrative forms, the paper highlights how writers respond to what Ghosh calls the “unthinkable.” The textual analysis focuses on how Ghosh critiques realism’s focus on individual experience and linear time. It also explores his call for alternative narrative modes grounded in myth, collective memory, and indigenous knowledge. These modes aim to restore ethical ties between humans and the more-than-human world. The paper concludes that literature in the Anthropocene must move beyond human-centered models of meaning. It must instead foster a sense of shared planetary responsibility. By treating storytelling as an ethical practice, Ghosh’s work offers a path toward cultural renewal in the face of climate crisis.