Published Paper Details:

Yann Martel in his short story The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios narrates the friendship of two young college friends among whom one dies of AIDS. The narrator of the story is a college senior who is shocked when he comes to know that his 19-year-old junior Paul has been diagnosed with AIDS. The narrator becomes the part of the family, spends his time to take care of Paul. Then he devises a plan of storytelling to pass their time. They invent family named Helsinki of Italian origin and create stories that will mirror the events of the 20th century. The story creates a perfect balance between the moments of a Paul's deterioration. Moments of pure passion, anguish, love and pain are connected with snippets of major historical events that have been ear marked as major moments of the twentieth century. Martel's choice of intermingling various literary allusion, direct quotation from literary and non-literary texts proves to be an intertextual reading.