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.
...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.
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.
In this mysterious story “The Eleventh Hour” the story was about a fantastic party the animals go to but while they are playing someone and steals the grand feast. My initial pre-reading prediction for “the Eleventh Hour” was that there were lots of animals who went to a fancy dress party and a big mystery unfolds during the story. My pre- reading prediction was kind of right. When Horace turns 11he celebrates in a grand style by inviting his friends over for a spectacular party. As they were playing someone from the party secretly sneaks into the banquet hall and gobbles down all the food.
The killings made by the slaves are saddening, too. Mutilating the whites and leaving their bodies lying is inhumane. It is such a shocking story. This book was meant to teach the reader on the inhumanity of slavery. It also gives us the image of what happened during the past years when slavery was practised.
He comments on racism that it is easier to just ignore racism because everyone is equal. We as a high school seniors know about racism and the author makes it more clearly that we should ignore racism. This novel is a science fiction, also it switches the tone from first person to third or third person to first. On page 23 the author Kurt Vonnegut shift from first person to third person voice and On page 67 the author shifts from third person to first person because it makes the novel more real. This novel is not only about war this book is about how to write and how to make the novel more realistic. This novel is great example for people who wants to write books.
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.
World War Z, written by Max Brooks, is an apocalyptic novel that follows an interviewer on a quest to piece together the global history twelve years after the zombie apocalypse that came to be know as “The Dark Years”. This novel is said to be an “oral history” because the plot is structured around the personal experiences around the world that is documented by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission. For the majority, oral histories are seen as beneficial because they allow for a unique perspective in historical records that readers do not usually get a sense of in a basic textbook. In order for one to understand its critical influence in this novel and its plot structure, it is important for readers to fully grasp what exactly
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”
The wallpaper, the center of the story, the perceived reason for her madness, was simply just wallpaper that she disliked. Every time she would describe it, her delusions would continually get worse. "I never saw a worse paper in my life." (Gilman) is her first observation of the paper. She strongly believed that there was a woman, "A strange, provoking, formless sort of figure." (Gilman) behind that paper who was creeping outside and around her room. She strongly believed that she needed to help this woman be free of the wretched wallpaper. She strongly believed that the wallpaper had a "yellow smell" (Gilman). No one could possibly make her disbelieve for one second that the woman didn't move about and yearn to be free of the strangling pattern. She believes that she is the only person who understands and can get the woman out of her
It narrates the story of October 1967 March to the Pentagon from the point of view of Mailer as a participant and as an eyewitness. In The Armies, Mailer attempts to put all the intertexts and their worlds in an interplay subverting any priori narrative based on political agendas. Therefore, the story of the March has many divergent intertexts each of which, “in [its] own separate way” represents a voice or a counterpoint to the main story. According to Mailer, “The Old Left,” has its own intertext of the story of the March that reads it as a “brickwork-logic-of-the-next-step”. The Old Left has to adapt this version of story to get political benefits. The Old Left “would always find a new step – the Left never left itself unemployed” (The Armies 102). Another inter-text of the same story can be provided by “The New Left” that draws “its political esthetic from Cuba”. This version of story is characterized by its revolutionary spirit that “existed in the nerves and cells of the people who created it and lived with it, rather than in the sanctity of the original idea” (The Armies 104). A third intertext is adopted by The Negroes or “The Black Militants,” who read the event as “a White War” of the “White Left” and announce “their reluctance to use their bodies in a White War” (The Armies 120). The White House officials interweave the thread of their own intertext for the main story of the march.
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.
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.
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...
...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)
...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.