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.
Lois Lowry’s book “The Giver” is about a community that has no flaws and everything is very controlled. They have no good or bad memories they just live their lives doing the jobs they were assigned. One day, Jonas, the new receiver, had an idea to release the memories back into the community. The story was later turned into a film and had some similarities, but the director of the movie departed from Lowry’s original story in a number of ways. By examining the different tones and the changes in a few of the characters, it's clear that the film departs from the story.
Rushdie, Salman. `Outside the Whale' Imaginary Homelands: Essays and criticisms 1981-1991 Penguin Books Ltd. (1992)
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...e, history, and blood. The specific commingling that emerges, however, has common roots in its very diversity. Throughout her tale Menchaca's allegiance is clearly to her race, and while the bias comes through, the history she traces is never the less compelling. The strongest achievement of this book is that it fundamentally shifts the gaze of its reader by reifying race and celebrating its complexity.
This week’s articles carry a couple related, if not common, themes of imagined, if not artificial, constructs of race and identity. Martha Hodes’ article, “The mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” offers a narrative based examination of the malleable terms on which race was defined. To accomplish this she examines the story of Eunice Connolly and her family and social life as a window into understanding the changing dimensions of race in nineteenth-century America and the Caribbean, specifically New England and Grand Cayman. While Hodes’ article examines the construction of race in the Americas, Ali A. Mazrui’s piece, “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Sai, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,” looks at the construction of African identity. Although different in geographic loci, the two articles similarly examine the shaping influences of race and identity and the power held in ‘the Other’ to those ends.
In his short story, O’Brien unravels step by step the irony in the double meaning of truth, implied in this first statement, “This is true”, to the reader which is then woven through the entire story. By trying to characterize what constitutes a true war story, but never really achieving this goal, the true irony of his short story is revealed. Even though in some instances giving away his opinion explicitly, the sheer contradiction of honesty and reality becomes even more visible in an implicit way by following O’Brien’s explanations throughout the story while he deconstructs his first statement. The incongruity between his first statement and what is actually shown in his examples does not need any explicit statements to drive home his message.
...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)
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.
Riot (2001), Shashi Tharoor’s third novel is set in the context of a fictitious riot that has resemblance to the riot that rocked Uttar Pradesh in 1989 as an aftermath of the Babri Masjid- Ram Janmabhoomi controversy. Tharoor unravels the history of communal India from the fictional context of the investigation of the death of a twenty-four year old idealistic American girl, Priscilla Hart, who was slain in India in the riot. From its premises, Tharoor also communicates his ideas “about ownership of history, cultural collision, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth” (
HARRIS, H., MURPHY, S., & VAISMAN, M. (2013).Analyzing the analyzers an introspective survey of data scientists and their work.Sebastopol, Calif, O'Reilly Media.http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9781449368388.
...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.
The concept of orientalism refers to the western perceptions of the eastern cultures and social practices. It is a specific expose of the eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both, the superiority of what is European or western and the inferiority of what is not. Salman Rushdie's Booker of the Bookers prize winning novel Midnights Children is full of remarks and incidents that show the orientalist perception of India and its people. It is Rushdie's interpretation of a period of about 70 years in India's modern history dealing with the events leading to the partition and beyond. Rushdie is a fantasist and a creator of alternate realities, the poet and prophet of a generation born at the degree zero of national history. The present paper is an attempt to study how Salman Rushdie, being himself a writer of diasporic consciousness, sometimes perceives India and its people as orientalist stereotypes and presents them in a derogatory manner.