50 pages • 1 hour read
Hanif KureishiThe Buddha of Suburbia
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Music
Period music is the soundtrack of this novel. Beginning with Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” (1965), Karim’s adventures are narrated thematically by the music he chooses to listen to and the music that others listen to. Karim’s choices in music mark the passage of time, as Karim does not always give the reader exact dates for events.
Furthermore, the music of the novel’s suburban section, mostly mainstream rock and folk music, contrasts sharply with the music of the London section. This shift mirrors social change.
Specifically, Kureishi exposes the disappointments of late 1960s and early 1970s social movements, particularly the workers’ class struggle, whose failures gave rise in England to the punk rock movement. Punk rock’s aims as political and social rebellion are meant to outrage and offend in a direct reflection of the alienation and rage experienced by jobless, hopeless youth. Youthful nihilism is a direct response to their perceptions of their future economic and political opportunities. In a similar form of social protest, Jamila listens to French and American jazz and blues to mark rebellion from white culture.
When punk rock is co-opted by Charlie Hero as a way to fame and fortune, Kureishi is ironically commenting on the ways in which rebellion is controlled and diffused by the dominant culture. Charlie’s cynical and self-serving usage of punk symbolizes its loss of power; it becomes just noise without meaning and soon fades as a cultural force.
Hypocrisy
Running through the plot of this novel is a motif of hypocrisy; at times, it is difficult to distinguish between what is phony and what is real. Many characters attempt to pull off cons or represent themselves as something they are not. Kureishi implicates nearly all of his characters as perpetrators of hypocrisy. Some hypocrisies are life-damaging while others appear to be simply an inevitable aspect of the human psyche.
In the first chapter, Karim sarcastically assigns the nickname “God” to his father. He wants to believe in his father’s “magic” because he sees how other people he respects, such as Eva and Charlie, respond to his father’s spiritual talks. He reserves his opinion as to whether his father is a fraud while he waits for more evidence. Haroon makes it difficult to discern whether he is sincere. For example, his philosophical knowledge is genuine, as is his care for other people, but he puts on a fake Indian accent and wears pajamas in an attempt to look like an Englishman’s idea of an Indian guru. His talks are a mixture of performance art and true philosophy. He mingles fraud with spiritual truth.
Similarly, Charlie Hero puts on a costume and an attitude and is taken for a true punk rocker instead of a middle-class pretender from South London. However, instead of criticizing Charlie as he does his father, Karim admires Charlie for being able to successfully pull off his punk rock con. Charlie gains substantial wealth and fame from his fraud.
In another instance, Terry determines that Matthew Pyke’s activism and reputation for radicalism is all a fraud, based on his grand house and his putting his child in an expensive private school. However, when Karim asks him for money for the socialist cause, Pyke immediately donates generously.
The mingling of shades of truth and lies through acting or social pretension occurs on nearly every page. Kureishi also spends a significant part of the novel delineating harmless ego-saving hypocrisies from huge, life-damaging hypocrisies. Haroon’s play-acting ends up being understandable and forgivable. Charlie’s hypocrisy, on the other hand, appears to be soul-destroying. In this way, Kureishi indicates that freedom from hypocrisy or ego-saving frauds cannot be the goal; instead, the goal is to gain self-awareness from the ways in which people lie about and to themselves. Suffering comes from believing in one’s own lies.
Clothing
Throughout the novel, clothing symbolizes Karim’s quest for acceptance. He always tries to wear clothes that represents the most current, mainstream fashion in order to fit in. For example, he wears turquoise trousers, a blue and white flowered see-through shirt, and a scarlet vest topped off with a headband to his father’s first meditation talk. His eye-catching ensemble is intended to exhibit him in the psychedelic 1960s hippie fashion of Jimi Hendrix or a similar rock star. He’s crushed when Charlie tells him to tone it down and lose the headband.
Karim’s clothing again becomes an issue when he’s dressed in a loin-cloth for his acting debut. The loin-cloth symbolizes his sociopolitical vulnerability and humiliation, as an Indian man dressed like a native.
Karim frequently describes what he wears in great detail, because he spends a considerable amount of time planning his look and attempting to make a particular impression with his clothing. He’s very upset when Charlie steals his expensive dress shirts, and he locks them up in response. This reveals that how he looks is precious to Karim.
Though not overly concerned with bodily beauty, Karim is vain of his wardrobe. Facing constant harassment for the color of his skin, he hopes to reduce the distance between his looks and the English ideal by figuring out exactly the “right” clothes to wear.
