My favorite part about the writing style on Midnight Children is the non-confidence of how the whole book is written. It seems Saleem is almost like a nerd trying to tell his tale but it isn’t written as a novel. It’s almost as if I were sitting across from Saleem in a bar or in his house and he’s telling me the stories, including when he makes a mistake. I prefer the writing style because it also feels more like a personable story than if it were being told in third person omniscient although it makes the story weird because technically Saleem tells the stories about his parents and grandparents in third person, making him a third person. Its hard to pin down which details in Saleems story are correct so the only difference is trying to figure out if he is omniscient or third person limited, but thats what makes the story’s writing style so fun to read. It reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson.

Discussion Question #1: How could Taiji be considered a “Christ-like” character in the novel? Answer: Taiji is a bit mysterious because no one knows his true age in addition to making references to how he has seen many kings and emperors die, implying immortality.  

Outline:

• Midnight’s Children is similar to the Bible due to the collection of miraculous short stories
• Saleem is possibly Jesus
• Taiji is a mysterious figure since his age is purposely kept vague

“Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year.” pg. 11

Discussion Question #2: How does prophecy play a role in the haunting(s) present in Midnight’s Children? Answer: Prophecy is what drives Amina’s anxiety in the novel. Even though it did not come to pass, the anxiety of possibly giving birth to a two-headed child still haunts her to this day, to the point that her anxiety is taking on the form of a ghost.

Outline:

• Ominous words (prophecy)
• Memory
• Paranoia
• Quotes (anecdotal evidence)

“Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all k’nds of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw once again the peepshow man whom she saved by announcing my coming and who repaid her by leading her to too much prophecy, and spoke to him evenly, without rancour.” pg. 41

Hayley Gillespie 

One theme I noticed is that Saleem has a problem with rejection. He does what he believes will woo a girl or woman and when he is turned down has a fit. For instance, when Evelyn Lillith Burns rejects him, he goes into her thoughts seeing a disturbing image of her. This, in turn, causes him to get pushed into a large mob. Another time is when he fondles his aunt Pria and gets slapped across the face. When the children seem to be abandoning the conference in the chapter, “Commander Sabarmati’s Baton”, he lashes out by telling the Commander about his cheating wife. When he is rejected he does not take it well or gets himself hurt. 

There is a theme of unrequited love in Midnight’s Children. Considering the chapter is titled “Love in Bombay” it’s ironic that the “love” shown is the opposite of what we as readers would be expecting. There is actually an absence of love in this chapter and most of what occurred is rather violent. Saleem’s love for instance remains unrequited and Evie pushes him into the crowd of marchers to “get rid of him.” The image of her and the bloody knife indicates this child perhaps has a violence streak. Evie’s affections for Sonny aren’t returned either nor are Padma’s for Saleem. Padma meant well but even her well meaning attempt to help  Saleem ends in a form of violence. This theme of unrequited love indicates an actual absence of love in a world so full of violence. 

Question One:

Does the fragmentation of Saleem’s memory distort the reliability of his narration?

• No, it does not distort his reliability, but informs it within this genre.
  • Quote one
    • On page 119, Saleem summarizes the thirty-two years before his birth “which condemned me [Saleem] to see my own life—its meanings, its structures—in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late” (Rushdie).

• Clear example of Fragmentation, which is important considering Saleem is the main character.
• The first book is told in fragments, creating the backbone of the fragmentation technique Rushdie used to craft this narrative.
  • Rushdie is telling the story of a country he was not there to witness or see, through Saleem who is focusing on the first 32 years before he even came into existence – a set of information that could have only been passed down to him. (not an authentic memory)
  • The fragments of Saleem’s history create the Saleem that understand moving forward in the novel.

• Quote two:
  • But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next…. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked. (Rushdie 37).
    • Much like Padma, the reader is uncomfortable in the lack of a linear narrative, and Rushdie uses this moment to point it out.
      • As the reader moves forward within the novel, we begin to look past the need for a linear structure and look to Saleem to inform us of important information.
      • Thus making us rely on his narrative for the duration of the novel.

Question Two:

There is a clear symbiotic relationship between Saleem and India; where do you believe the power of that relationship lies?

• There are four ways one can look at this relationship
  • Saleem’s narrative informs the history of India
  • The history of India informs Saleem’s Narrative
  • To understand himself Saleem must anchor his identity into the history of India because it is a solid foundation.
    • In his mind he believes that he is the center of the universe.
      • Quote 4: “I was already beginning to take my place at the center of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all.” (143-144)
    • However this comes off as biased and narcissistic. In any first person narrative, one’s opinion of something else tells us more about them.
  • As a reader we find that he, as an old man, is working through his understanding of himself and has anchored it into the history of India. In fact he resonates with the history as the core of his identity,
    • Quote 3: “I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust. This is why i have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a narration of forgetters.) (Rushdie 36).
      • When the book was published (1981), the population of India was at like 700 million, but in 1976 like 5 years prior, the population was at 635 million. So assuming that’s around the time Rushdie wrote this iit would make sense that Saleem is not only tied to his country but a deep metaphor for the fate of that country as much as it is a metaphor for what will happen in his narrative.
    • Ultimately proving that the power of their relationship is interdependent on both, as their historys unfolded simultaneously.

The style of writing and narration in Midnight’s Children is very poetic, which makes it somewhat confusing. Rushdie spends a very long paragraph describing Aadam’s nose, and its descendants, which just seems like an odd break from the advancement of the plot. The importance of Aadam’s nose isn’t revealed until he sneezes violently, falls down, and is saved from a bullet. The importance of giving the nose a whole paragrah’s worth of description comes off as exhausting. Similar to the repetion of the blood becoming jewels and the parrallel of Aadam’s mother taking over the gem business after his father’s stroke. These descriptions are repeated over and over and it is not till several paragraphs later that they are fully connected with their plot point, i.e. Aadam’s decision to not bow to any God or man, leaving him with a hole that is later filled by his future wife, who he can only see through a whole. Maybe it’s the title of the book affecting my perception, but following along the plot seems an awful lot like trying to find constellations in the night sky- it’s a little disorienting.

““I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.””

In this quote, Saleem is defending his version of events to Padma at the end of Book Two. What really stood out to me with this quote, is not the wording or the defense, but rather the utter truth of it. Every truth is subjective to the person saying it. It can be twisted, it can be transformed, yet it still remains the truth, because every memory is biased and each person sees the world, remembers the world in different forms of truth.

If a soldier is killed in war, who do you blame? Their comrades? The man who drafted him? Or the man that started and continued the war? Each of these may or may not have played a certain type of role that could lead to the soldier’s death. Each of them is a truth that could be used to blame the death of the soldier on them.

A man could blame himself for killing a person, but when asked what he did, he could simply say that it was his idea to use a certain tactic that relied on a back-up that he was sure would work, but, in fact, failed, thus resulting in the soldier being killed. Do you blame the man with the plan or the back-up that refused to show for the soldier’s death?

The truth of the quote is that memory modifies what we remember, painting a villain, a hero, a bystander in negative or positive lights depending on emotions and your own view of the events. 

     Theme

     While reading this first section of Midnight’s Children, I noticed a certain reoccurring symbol in the text and the theme of major historical events connecting in the family’s lives. When Aadam had to examine Naseem’s body because of her illnesses, he had to do so through a perforated sheet. He slowly began to fall in love with her by seeing just glimpses of her, then when she complained of a headache, he was finally able to see her face which coincided with the day the World War ended. The perforated sheet symbol comes back again when Amina, who is in an unhappy marriage, attempts to fall in love with her husband by viewing just fragments of him. This seemed like a reversed version of what happened with Aadam and Naseem because they fell in love by viewing just glimpses of each other, then they found that they were unhappy with their marriage while Amina and Ahmed were unhappy together to begin with, so she had to fall in love with him in pieces “…to do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral…” (p. 73). Amina attempted to fall in love with him by viewing just fragments of his personality instead of loving the entirety of him.   

Theme

One of the main themes I’ve noticed thus far in Midnight’s Children would be the unreliability of memory and of narratives. Throughout the novel, Saleem acknowledges that he remembers things wrong or presents factual errors, like an election date. He is honest about his errors and uses them to progress the story and one of the overall ideas he is trying to get across in the novel, that truth is a matter of different perspectives and not just facts. One person’s truth could be different than another person’s and I believe that is what Saleem is trying to prove as he tells his story. Saleem even notices that memory creates its own truth, and that anything can be anyone’s truth as long as they believe in it.

One of the interesting points of this story is about the role the noses of the family plays in the story. At the beginning we see a young doctor Aadam Aziz fall on his nose and immediately distances himself from any type of religion, vowing to never bow in front of any man or god again. This gets him into trouble later on during his marriage with Naseem due to the fact that she’s religious and he isn’t. It’s not a typical haunting, but the otherworldly effect his nose seems to have in his life is very interesting. Then during the protest, Aziz’s nose begins to itch as military men surround the location of the protesters. Suddenly, he sneezes and falls down, therefore saving his life. The idea of haunting is that ideas out of our relatively limited parameters as humans means that we sometimes assign things as coincidences even when they could be two unrelated things. Major life events in the Aziz family seems to coincidentally fall on the same dates that major world events take place such as the end of World War 2 and the Atomic Bombing. Even Saleem is born on the exact day India became independent.