Colonial Inferiority and Postcolonial Ideology in Pramoedya’s House of Glass: Between the Dominant and the Marginalized

Abstract

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, despite his position of being controversial among the Indonesian writers, wrote four historical novels, which have been compiled in the title of Buru Quartet. The core of the contents is about the stress between the Dutch-Indies colonial government and Indonesia’s local, marginalized, and colonized people. As postcolonial novels they certainly effort to voice the desire, will, and also hope of the marginalized people in opposing the dominant colonial government. However, through the last novel, Rumah Kaca, Pramoedya applies a certain technique which is interesting and different from the other common postcolonial novels, including also those the first three novels. The existence of a narrator, representing the colonial government, seems to emphasize that as a matter of fact, the colonizer has the problem of being inferior to the colonized. Rumah Kaca conveys this notion by showing that due to the inferiority the colonizer would undergo illogical conduct for the sake of maintaining the position of being the controller. Even, to the very helpless and powerless activist, Minke, the colonizer must undergo a violent and illogical act to his death.