Economics is Life, Life is Economics: The Rhetoric of Agency in a Scathing, Compassionate Quarrel with the World in Neel Mukherjee’s Choice

Abstract

Aims: This paper examines how Choice interrogates agency, freedom, and economic determinism within neoliberal modernity. Drawing upon Donald N. McCloskey’s idea of economics as a rhetorical and ideological discourse, the study explores how Mukherjee critiques liberal assumptions regarding rationality, development, and individual choice through fragmented postmodern narratives shaped by capitalism, migration, race, and class inequality.

Methodology: The study adopts a qualitative and interpretative approach based on close textual reading. It selectively engages with theories of postmodernism, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism through thinkers such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, David Harvey, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The analysis focuses on fragmentation, paranoia, intertextuality, and pastiche in the novel.

Outcome: The paper argues that the novel exposes the illusion of autonomous agency under neoliberal capitalism. Mukherjee demonstrates that individual choices are deeply conditioned by structures of class, race, geography, and institutional power. The fragmented narrative destabilizes grand narratives of progress and development while revealing the human cost of economic rationality.

Conclusion and Suggestions: The study concludes that Choice transforms economics into an ethical and philosophical question concerning dignity, freedom, and inequality. Further research may explore broader postmodern and postcolonial dimensions of neoliberal anxiety in contemporary South Asian fiction.