Existential Realism, Illusion, and Renunciation in R.K. Narayan's The Guide and The Vendor of Sweets: A Systematic Literary Review

Abstract

This paper undertakes a systematic and analytical literary investigation of R.K. Narayan's The Guide (1958) and The Vendor of Sweets (1967), arguing that both novels stage a shared three-stage movement — immersion in illusion (maya), existential rupture, and renunciatory withdrawal — through which Narayan fuses Sartrean existentialism with Advaitic metaphysics. Employing a systematic literature review (SLR) protocol adapted from PRISMA guidelines alongside close analytical reading, the study synthesises pre-2023 scholarship on Narayan's fiction, existentialist philosophy, and the Hindu institution of sannyasa to demonstrate that Raju and Jagan's respective trajectories cannot be read as straightforwardly triumphant spiritual conclusions, nor as pure existentialist self-authorship, but as deliberately ambiguous zones in which Western categories of freedom and Eastern categories of liberation are held in unresolved tension. The paper further situates this ambiguity within postcolonial and feminist critical perspectives, arguing that Narayan's ironic narrative distance prevents any single interpretive framework from achieving closure. Comparative tabulated analysis of the two protagonists' arcs, their relationships to female and filial figures, and their acts of renunciation reveals both structural continuity and significant divergence in the seriousness and completeness of each character's liberation. The paper concludes that Narayan's fiction constitutes a distinctively Indian existential realism — one grounded not in Sartrean absurdity alone but in the productive collision between illusion, freedom, and dharma.