Mrs Moore's Departure From India Analysis

Mrs Moore’s departure from India gives insight to the complexity of the experience she had within the Marabar caves. She appears to want to experience something other than anything she had ever experienced before, yet she was not able to fully comprehend what happened to her. Instead of enlightenment she encounters feelings of apathy and confusion, as her world view that had been carefully constructed for her through the teachings of her religion and the society she is a part of was suddenly brought into question. Moore is deeply disturbed spiritually by her experience within the caves. She no longer is able to take solace in her own religion as she has been in the presence of something much older and more complex than Christianity. Chapter
This is symbolic of her feeling the overwhelming nature and complexity of the presence within the caves. She is unable to comprehend what she experienced therefore she becomes apathetic towards it, which came naturally as she was ‘always inclined to resignation’. Since she could not make sense of the experience she therefore was unwilling to. Upon her departure it would appear as if the environment was mocking her for that exact reason, as the coconut palms laugh at her expense, asking if she ‘thought an echo was India’ and if she ‘took the Marabar caves as final’. These questions exemplify her unwillingness to explore further and truly discover India as she initially set out to do. Moore set out with the intentions to discover ‘the real India’ and subsequently fled when she was confronted with the slightest possibility that her understanding of the world could be only one side of a multifaceted
Moore’s initial perception of India and the goals she intends to meet are drastically altered by the reality she is presented with in the caves. Moore naïvely envisioned her goal of being ‘one with the universe’ as a ‘beautiful and easy one’. Not only did she seek spiritual enlightenment but she also sought to explore the possibility of friendship and even love amongst the Indians and British. However, through her experiences in India and finally the caves she realises that this goal is simply unobtainable, thus answering the question of friendship. The narrator further depicts Moore as being blindsided by her experience, as she was ‘pottering about’ as the ‘Marabar struck its gong’. Her newfound perception, albeit not one of an understanding nature, presents her with the ‘twilight of double vision’. She ‘had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time’, showing how she saw how immense and unnerving the universe truly is. Moore is presented with the notion that the universe is not as stable as she had initially thought, and that as well as being extremely vast it is also very