Arun Joshi is one of the post independencea post-independence Indian novelistsnovelist in English who chose to explore the angst-redden psyche of modern man. While inhis contemporaries, like R.P. Jhabvala and Anita Desai, focused on themes like the east-west encounter and women questionwomen's questions respectively, he felt prompted to respond to the apprehensive situation created by the cataclysmic Second World War. CoincidentallyNot coincidentally, he was born on 7th July, 1939, a couple of month ofmonths prior to the outbreak of the second warWWII. In his own persistencepersistent manner, he endeavored to creatively exploit this critical situation in his novels,: The Foreigner (1968), The Strange case of Billy Biswas (1971), The Apprentice (1974), Sahitya Academy Award winning titlle thetitle The Last Labyrinth (1981) and theThe City and The River (1990). The critical grown roundTo critically review his fiction hasis to engage a very perceptively examinedperceptive examination of the various factesfacts of Joshi's creativity, which have earned for him an envious position among his contemporaries. The ScholarScholars like C.N. Srinath and Shyam Ansari broadly focus on the shift from the external reality to the inner space in this novels, while R.K. Srivastava, R. S. Pathak and Hari Mohan Prasad(1) have attempted to place Joshi's novels in western Existentialist traditions. These critics marginally touch the quality of conflict that informs Arun Joshi's novels and it is viable to explore this dimensionthese dimensions in a full-length doctoral project,. The present thesis is designed as a modest attempt to extricate the nuances of conflict that invariably grip Johi'sJoshi's protagonists.