Analysis of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children employs strategies which engage in an exploration of History, Nationalism and Hybridity. This essay will examine three passages from the novel which demonstrate these issues. Furthermore, it will explore why each passage is a good demonstration of these issues, how these issues apply to India in the novel, and how the novel critiques these concepts.
The passage from pages 37-38 effectively demonstrates the concept of history, as it foregrounds elements important to this issue. Rushdie, challenges the conventional modes of history through his self reflective narrative structure. The passage is a good demonstration of its topic as it illustrates the problems of re-writing history. His mode of writing attempts to encourage the reader to reconsider the valid interpretation of his history. Saleem writes “please believe that I am falling apart” ,as he begins “to crack like an old jug”, illustrating a sense of fragmentation of his story. This parallels the narrative structure of the novel as being circular, discontinuous and digressive. This fragmentation appropriates the concept of history, which was developed by colonisers. History works for a particular class of ideology, and therefore it will be contaminated, oblique and subjective.
The ‘fictionality’ of history is grounded in the simple assumption that life is shaped like a story. For Saleem, who is “buffeted by too much history”, it is his memory which creates his own history. “Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks”. This reflects back to concepts of time and place. Yet, for Rushdie, it is not based on the universal empty time that has been conceptualised by the colonisers. Notions of time and space are integrated into his own history.
The novel critiques concepts of history by challenging traditional conventions. Rushdie uses unreliable events to subvert official notions of history. For example, in his description of the Amrister Massacre he describes the troops that fire on the crowd as being white, when they were not. He does this perhaps to illustrate how much history is based on interpretation and ideology. It also illustrates how fact (written down as history), fails to take into account different notions of space and time. For example, in the pas...
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...s, his biological father is a departing colonist. The passage on page 211 clearly demonstrates Saleem’s hybrid identity. He relates hybridity to history by entailing the hetreogeneity of memory. “Memory’s truth because memory has its own special kind” . For Saleem, his memory provides a search for the truth, rather than many truths.
Saleem links his hybrid history to ‘chutney’ which illustrates the sign of a mixed identity. “Green chutney on chilli-pakoras” , this imagery of chutney runs throughout the novel and assist Saleem’s story. He later, uses this image to sum up his hybridise culture, which parallels “the chutnification of history” and “pickling of time”. Rushdie comments on the colonised mimicking the coloniser. Two histories have emerged together, which is filled with contamination as mimicry becomes a problem as it disrupts the power. This reflects, what Rushdie calls like ‘chutney’, a mixture of history, and nationalism that become so dense and enmeshed that they transform to create a new culture. Rushdie effectively tackles issues of post-colonial studies of history, nationalism and hybridity, and Midnight’s Children illustrates and challenges these concepts.
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The narrator, referred to as Jane, has been suffering from what her husband, who is a physician, believes is a “temporary nervous depression.” He prescribes a “rest cure”
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Contemporary Writers No Longer Feel Duty Bound To Follow Major Historical And Social Changes The world after 1930’s has witnessed a number of changes and upheavals. World’s rich history gives plethora of details on such changes due to a number of factors including World War, scientific break-through, invention of scads of unbelievable sophisticated machines, mass genocide through nuclear bombings and all that. In fact, the sky is the limit. Despite such innumerable changes that took place after 1930’s, a number of literary masterpieces and best-selling written material seem as if they have no concern with the changes occurred in such periods. The famous authors and writers who are behind such writings seem to be quite callous with the prevailing miseries all over the world. In fact, they are just confined into shells of their own ego. As our thesis statement, “Contemporary writers no longer feel duty bound to follow major historical and social changes”, this paper reviews Cat’s Cradle written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle demonstrates the particular effectiveness of the genre as an instrument of social criticism. A close study of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction reveals his interest in the epistemological question of mankind's ability to distinguish between reality and illusion. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's attempt to resolve this question is basically pragmatic and pluralistic. Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle, is his most detailed treatment of the epistemological problem, and in it he once again appears to be presenting a pragmatic approach to a pluralistic universe. Its very title suggests the difficulty in distinguishing between reality and illusion. Since Cat's Cradle is narrated by John, Kurt Vonnegutist, deal...
Critics have already begun a heated debate over the success of the book that has addressed both its strengths and weaknesses. The debate may rage for a few years but it will eventually fizzle out as the success of the novel sustains. The characters, plot, emotional appeal, and easily relatable situations are too strong for this book to crumble. The internal characteristics have provided a strong base to withstand the petty attacks on underdeveloped metaphors and transparent descriptions. The novel does not need confrontations with the Middle East to remain a staple in modern reading, it can hold its own based on its life lessons that anyone can use.
The Giver is about a boy named Jonas who was chosen to be the community’s next Receiver of Memory. He lived in a community where everything was chosen for the citizens, and everything was perfect. During Jonas' training, he realized that the community was missing something and that there was more in the world. Jonas wanted everybody to know that. The Giver book was then made into a movie. Though the two were based with the same story plot, there are three important differences that results with two different takes on the same story. The three main differences between the book and the movie are Asher and Fiona's Assignments, the similarity all Receivers had, and the Chief Elder's role.
Gilman incorporates strong imagery throughout "The Yellow Wallpaper" to set the scene for the story and foreshadow the certain madness that is to come of the narrator. As the story progresses, so does the woman's declining mental status. An example of how imagery is used to display the inferiority of women is the fact that the woman in the story is confined to the old nursery room for most of her time. Gilman describes the room as "It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium...windows barred for little children" (Gilman 311). The woman focuses often on the wallpaper of the nursery. It is described as, "flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin..the color is repellent...a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight." The fact that she focuses so meticulously on the yellow wallpaper shows her crazed psyche. Later in the story, the narrator writes, "There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down...up and down and sideways they crawl...those absurd unblinking eyes everywhere" This makes the reader feel uneasy and explicitly details the madness of her neurosis.
...s that Bhabha only views hybridity through the lens of the individual who wishes to adopt and synthesize his personal identity and does not account for the normativization of fluidity and change and the recognition that certain aspects of cultures cannot be blended. He also claims that Bhabha does not address the infinite ability to question and renegotiate identity; the idea that identity formation is exclusively individualistic and not related to notions of community inclusion or exclusion. Kompridis’ essay enlightens the reader’s understanding of how hybridity has been used to render conceptually and normatively, indefensible the political claims of culture by skewing the social understanding of cultural identity. Kompridis’ analysis is important because it demonstrates how Othering discourse fails to recognize the identity and nonidentity of cultural categories.
...edieval times. Moslems leaders claim that the title of the novel The Satanic Verses disrespected their god, because it refers to their god as Satan. Even though Rushdie was raised as a Moslem, and claims he follows no religion, the Khomeini mentions that Rushdie rejected the words of his former religion, therefore, joined the enemies of Islam, and committed a crime.(Phillips 18) In the Islam tradition, the Koran is factually the word of God, transmitted by the Archangel Gabriel through the Prophet Mohammed. The result of Rushdie's novel is viewed as mocking wordplay.(Phillips 19) Socrates gained enemies for his speculations on philosophy. Socrates had young rich men followers who viewed him as an inspiring leader, therefore, was also blamed for teaching the youth his ideas. Both Salman Rushdie and Socrates were held responsible for religious insult. (Plato 20 - 24)