Hopping in a careful, calculated manner across four generations of a rich and demented Indian family, Salman Rushdie's cynical novel The Moor's Last Sigh laughs mischievously at the world and shivers from its evils. Weaving a tale of murder and suicide, of atheism and asceticism, of affection and adultery, Rushdie's exquisitely crafted storytelling explains the "fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed," namely our narrator Moraes Zogoiby, also known as "Moor."
At the centerpiece of this odd and captivating tale stand the embers of Moor's family: a complex web including a ridiculed political activist, a shrew, a homosexual husband, an artist, and a Jewish underworld gangster, among others. Moor's sisters lead lives as abnormal and doomed as their family history would predispose them towards: Ina, a washed-up model, dies in the throes of insanity; Minnie takes holy orders, predicting a great plague washing over Bombay and envisioning talking rats; Mynah, a lesbian, hopelessly infatuated with Moor's lover, dies in an industrial "accident" that m y~be~her~ father's doing. Such is ...
The theme that has been attached to this story is directly relevant to it as depicted by the anonymous letters which the main character is busy writing secretly based on gossip and distributing them to the different houses. Considering that people have an impression of her being a good woman who is quiet and peaceful, it becomes completely unbecoming that she instead engages in very abnormal behavior. What makes it even more terrible is the fact that she uses gossip as the premise for her to propagate her hate messages not only in a single household but across the many different households in the estate where she stays.
Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Delhi: Penguin, 1990. Second paperback edition 1996.
What the parodies do to the figure of Geraldine is of particular interest. There are many answers to who and what she is. Some, following the conventions of Gothic romance suggest a "fairy tale" resolution which re-establishes the hetero-sexual order (Christabel marries her far away lover) and the supernatural and mysterious Geraldine is expelled.
The characters provide a contrast for the readers, by presenting the powerlessness of women through Esme’s fate in the institution after her refusal to conform to married life, and the subplot of Iris being a contemporary version of Esme. Esme’s suffering foreshadows the events of Iris’ life. Through the use of narrative voice, symbols and foreshadowing, O’Farrell reveals that all aspects of Esme’s life are determined by society’s expectations to create the essence of the harsh effects of patriarchy for the reader to
Huitt, W. (2007),Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University, (http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/regsys/maslow.html), [Accessed 29 December 2013].
Salman Ahmed Rushdie is an eminent postcolonial diasporic writer of Indian origin. He was born in a Muslim family in 1947, the year India became free from the clutches of the colonial rule. The novelist and essayist of international repute, Rushdie, started his writing with the fictional work Grimus (1975). His second novel Midnights’ Children (1981) won the Booker’s Prize. The text focuses on the simultaneous independence and partition of the two nations. He came into thick of controversies because of his novel, The Satanic Verses. (1988). The Muslims considered the novel to be blasphemous. The publication of the novel led to a wide range of demonstrations and protests worldwide. The publication of the text became dearer for him as the Muslim religious leader of Iran issued a fatwa. The fatwa meant that the man who takes away the life of Rushdie would get one billion dollars as a reward. As such, he continues to live under threat to his life till today. Rushdie’s fame as a novelist is immense. More than seven hundred journal articles and numerous book chapters have been published on it. In the text Shame, Rushdie gives his account of societal and political life in Pakistan. He is satirical of the social conditions in the country which are the resultant of undemocratic, dictatorial and unlawful political practices of the leaders of Pakistan. The present paper attempts to analyze the issue of marginalization of women in the patriarchal society of Pakistan. Rushdie tries to highlight the denial of rights to the Pakistani masses, especially the women, by the rulers. Rushdie portrays the gloomy picture of the Pakistani society in which the women have to face acute sufferings and oppression and suppression has become the talk of the...
When discussing the controversial authors of Indian literature, one name should come to mind before any other. Salman Rushdie, who is best known for writing the book “Midnights Children.” The first two chapters of “Midnights Children” are known as “The Perforated Sheet”. In “The Perforated Sheet” Rushdie utilizes magic realism as a literary device to link significant events and their effects on the lives of Saleem’s family to a changing India. In fact, it is in the beginning of the story that the reader is first exposed to Rushdie’s use of magic realism when being introduced to Saleem. “On the stroke of midnight/clocks joined palms” and “the instant of India’s arrival at independence. I tumbled forth into the world”(1711). Rushdie’s description of the clocks “joining palms” and explanation of India’s newfound independence is meant to make the reader understand the significance of Saleem’s birth. The supernatural action of the clocks joining palms is meant to instill wonder, while independence accentuates the significance of the beginning of a new era. Rushdie also utilizes magic realism as an unnatural narrative several times within the story to show the cultural significance of events that take place in the story in an abnormal way.
Another major role model in Marjane’s life was her grandm... ... middle of paper ... ... Marji to realize that the culture’s idolization of martyrs is completely warped. Throughout the rest of the novel Marji never truly escapes the pain that witnessing so much death has caused her, in Austria she tires drugs and love to comfort her, but nothing works the gruesome picture is never able to escape her mind. Marji is impacted be the courageous women came before her, the women that die unjustly, and even the women who attempt to take away her individuality.
In the novel, action speaks louder than characters. Each character in the novel represents the dark reality of the society. Locution and the composition of provocative verses leave gaps, which should be filled up by the readers. The character of Lakshmi is the epitome for many unknown and unnoticed Lakshmies, who are the victims of Trafficking and Sexual Slavery world-wide. Through Lakshmi’s stream of Consciousness the readers get conscious about the atrocities done to poor children and women for the sake of money.
Though scarcely the “barbarian” (1.3.353) he is called, the Moor is emphatically black, probably rough, even fearsome, in appearance, and a foreign mercenary from Mauritania in refined Venice. Though of royal blood, since the age of seven he had a restrictive, painful life, being sold into slavery and spending most of his life in “the tented field” (1.3.85).
Salman Rushdie tries to break the binary by using a very different kind of narrative, a mixture of an oral narrative style with all the colloquialisms typical of that style, on the one hand, and a very formal style typical of written language on the other. In addition to this other ‘Englishes’ like Pidgin English are used. These elements serve to place the novel outside the Western tradition, even though it uses a language, English, and a format, the novel, which are central to the Western literary canon. I will analyse the style and genre of the novel to show how Rushdie accomplishes all this. Next I will try to show that the n...
Unfortunately, especially in the inner city, it is unrealistic to expect all middle school students to come to school ready to learn. This is because so many of them are stuck in a low level of Maslow’s hierarchy. The...
Kane, Jean M. “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children.’” Contemporary Literature 37.1 (1996): 94-118. JSTOR. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.
...lagiarism has led at least a few educators to contemplate high-tech solutions. Two employees of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Ned Feder and Walter Stewart, have designed a computer program to scan text and recognize word-for-word similarities as short as 32 characters long. Still, the programs have their limits, and, in the end, it's a losing battle. The whole point of the Internet is to share information. To get the benefits of online technology, universities have to cope with the costs. The only real solution to cyberplagiarism, then, is old-fashioned vigilance. Having spent millions of dollars wiring their students to the Internet, universities may have to invest in smaller classes and a better teacher-to- student ratio. A return to some good old analog, face-to-face teaching may be the only way to keep online plagiarism at the fringes, where it belongs.
The action of the play revolves round the bringing of the sick fifth woman by Sakharam and his friend Dawood to the hospital; her consequent demise and her last Hindu rites by Sakharam at the persistent cajoling of Dawood. In the course of this description, the dramatist has unraveled the actual position of women in the mind of men–folk, who go on changing female company like their clothes. Sakharam treats the fifth woman as a source of his physical gratification without any emotional attachment. At her death, he only thinks of the sixth woman who has to come to take her place. The reality is also ironically highlighted in the words of the crow which is supposed to belong to the next world. Here the man is found bemoaning at the loss of his source of virility which differentiates him from the female. Tendulkar’s art of handling of a serious subject with an uncompromising comical strain enables him to enjoy respect with