It remains for us to look at various aspects of form in Narayan's writings because ultimately in all literary analysis, we must be attentive not only to what is said but how it is said. A literary work is both communique and artifact, a thing said and a thing made. From this point of view it is appropriate to recall that Narayan has tried his hand at different genres. He is an essayist, a short story-writer, a novelist and a ‘faction’ writer, by which one means that one sees a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction in his work. In works like Dateless Diary, My Days and Grandmother's Tale, we see a remarkable mix of fact and fiction. Here we can speak of the facticity of fiction and the fictive nature of fact. This, as we have noted, is very much a feature of writing in contemporary times. Commentators like Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse (1978) have explored this link between reality and writing, or history and literature, quite boldly. Narayan, in addition, is a writer of novels or novellas and finally, he is a transcreator of Indian myths and folk legends. This variety makes him a very interesting writer and in what follows, an attempt will be made to touch on questions of Narayan's adherence to realism, a point repeatedly alluded to in earlier parts of this book, and to see if this realism is ‘English’ or ‘Indian’.