Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

Midnights Children Salman Rushdei

1. Comment on the author’s style and characterization. Are the characters believable or paper cutouts? Comic or tragic or both? Are their dilemmas universal to human nature or particular to their situation?

- Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:

I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.

- In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust."

- It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender.

- Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.

2. What is the most important theme of the work?

- Spittoons appear through out Midnight's Children. The motif of the spittoon allows the narrative to circle back on itself without losing its forward momentum; by reintroducing it in different contexts, Rushdie builds meaning into the image and provides the reader with a reference point and familiar angle of i...

... middle of paper ...

...s . . . but then I was on the wrong track, too; I could not see any more clearly than anyone else" (273-4).

7. What is the value of studying works of creative literature for an understanding of another society and its history? Your own by comparison?

The story of Midnight’s Children parallels the real history of India from 1910 to the declaration of the emergency in 1976. The reader experiences the story through the eyes of the main character, Saleem Sinai, who was born auspiciously at midnight of India’s Independence. Although Midnight's Children is a story with political overtones, its well-written multi-dimensional characters go on an even more riveting personal journey that sucks the readers into the story without thinking about the political context of the story. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is both the history of a sub-continent and the struggle of the Indian people for Independence, as well as a story of a boy's coming to age and a family’s saga.

Midnight’s Children spans 63 years of Saleem’s and India’s history beginning in 32 years before Saleem’s birth and ending when Saleem is about to 32.

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midnight's children by salman rushdie