SOURCE: "Encounter with the Self: A Study of the Confessional Mode in Mulk Raj Anand's The Bubble," in The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s, edited by Viney Kirpal, Allied Publishers Limited, 1990, pp. 11-23.

In the following essay, Pallan discusses the quest of "being" and "becoming" as presented in The Bubble.

Mulk Raj Anand believes that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness. The life of an individual is undergoing various changes, transformations, metamorphoses through various struggles against the slavery of mind and body. And this confrontation of opposites compels human beings to renew themselves in order to evolve to the higher degrees of consciousness:

Consciousness becomes the highest ideal of the awakening individual. The renewal is not an obvious or predetermined Karmic process. It is the kind of dialectic...