The Post Office by Rabindranath Tagore
Published 1912 · 9,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama, Symbolist Theatre
How hard is The Post Office to read?
The Post Office scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 26 out of 100
- A child's vocabulary carries most of the play; the translated Bengali is deliberately simple and songlike.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Short exchanges between a sick boy at a window and the people who pass; almost nothing is subordinated.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Amal's waiting for a letter from the King is a metaphysical proposition dressed as a children's game, and the play never lets it settle into one meaning.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- A single room, a window, six or seven visitors—the play carries almost no external information.
- Narrative indirection: 56 out of 100
- Everyone around Amal speaks in figures they do not understand; the audience must decide what the King's letter actually is.
- Symbolic density: 84 out of 100
- The post office built across the road, the letter that never comes, and the King's physician who opens all the doors and windows at the end read as death, liberation, and grace at once.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- The village headman forges a royal letter to mock a dying child, and the mockery becomes true—Tagore lets the cruelty deliver the miracle.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Amal falls silent and the flower-girl is told to wake him when he wakes; whether he dies or is healed is left entirely unspoken.
- Structural complexity: 34 out of 100
- Two acts, one room, one boy—Tagore gets his effect from stillness rather than structure.
How The Post Office is regarded
The Post Office holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.