Taylor Holmes, Oubah Dougsiyeh, Courtney Parks, Tiffany Pollock

How does Rushdee use of a unreliable narrator emphasize the postmodern narrative structure?

“The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I can-not say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric?”

• What is this actually about? Can we trust anything Saleem the narrator tells us?

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems… but as you approach the present… I become a sort of radio (189)”

“In accordance with my lotus’s wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung.”

• Define postmodern themes and structures
• Identify how Midnight’s Children displays these traits
  • Saleem’s inability to remember details correctly
  • Saleem’s fragmented thoughts that are to be taken as fact
  • The clear bias that alters the reading of the novel

One of the most interesting elements of the narrative thus far are the parallels seen between Salman and Saleem and their birth into independence and the turmoil that follows historically. Saleem’s story reflects some of the experience of Salman Rushdie probably quite literally. Along with this parallel, Saleem’s life parallels the story of the entire nation. His life experiences align with significant historical events allowing for the individual story of Saleem to represent that of the entire nation of India. Although this is a retelling of personal events there is an element of connectivity that shows a representation greater than self. 

Comparison 

Rushdie’s language is not easy to understand. Many of his sentences are 3 or more lines long, and there aren’t always dialogue tags or other clear indicators of what someone is saying versus what they’re thinking and observing. I had to read many pages multiple times, and still came away with just a vague sense of understanding what’s going on. I wish I could get more clarity on the transitions between subjects and why they’re relevant. I appreciate the reveal in each chapter where the chapter name is explained. These moments are grounding and help when trying to know what to take away from each chapter.

When we compare this to Woolf or Forster the main difference for me is that these authors use imagery to kind of ground each scene. Their transitions are smooth from character to character because they take the time to consider the setting and other external indicators before going into the character’s internal thoughts. Rushdie doesn’t really do that.

Like many of our other readings, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children often takes to referencing ghosts in the form of memories. Memories play an essential role in this story as a whole, but their frequency of being compared with ghosts is quite interesting in itself. For example, Saleem mentions about his mother, “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.” The memory of the prophecy goes on to haunt Amina’s thoughts, particularly through her pregnancy, childbirth, and Saleem’s childhood developments. She is continually thankful that he was not born with two heads, yet still fears any potential meaning behind the other words spoken in the prophecy. The emphasis of Amina and ghostly memories is exemplified in these segments which state, “Some ghost-memory of Nadir Khan hiding from crescent knives in a cornfield,” and  “Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corridor in a blind man’s house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she lost her Joseph, and like me, my mother was good at seeing ghosts.” The memory of her first husband is a common haunting of Amina’s, which causes her to feel a confusing range of emotions. Guilt of straying her thoughts from her current family, residual love for Nadir, and longing for the past, are just a few of those emotions that haunt Amina. Saleem’s recognition of his mother’s memories, (or her ability to “See ghosts”) is a reinforcement of the outstanding idea that ghosts most often take the shape of people’s memories. 

Alex Lotti

Salman Rushdie uses Saleem Sinai’s voice to jump from one character’s story to another in Midnight’s Children. When considering Virginia Woolf’s seamless transitions between perspectives, I would expect the use of a first-person narrator to lend itself to even smoother segues. Saleem, however, frequently interrupts himself with either corrections or Padma updates. Since Rushdie knows his audience, Saleem often has to pause to educate or remind the reader on cultural or historical elements relevant to the circumstances of each story. Rushdie makes no attempt to conceal the jumps in Midnight’s Children because their purpose is to call attention.

While neither Mrs. Dalloway nor  Midnight’s Children technically fall under the literary stream-of-conscious writing style, both authors are hyper-aware of their characters’ consciousnesses and go about attacking them with different, if not opposing, methods. Woolf slips freely in and out of the mind of whatever character is nearby to spy on his or her thoughts, without giving the character a chance to defend his or herself, whereas Rushdie, as Saleem, invites the reader to join him on his internal journey as he dissects his own past, often asserting and reasserting his opinions as facts. Though the characters dwell on the past from time, Mrs. Dalloway is all about documenting the present, while Midnight’s Children is a fictional memoir. From Saleem’s uncertainty comes a realism that sometimes seems more believable than the fleeting memories of Woolf’s characters in Mrs. Dalloway, despite the magic aspect of Midnight’s Children, because nothing is more natural than recalling something incorrectly.

The first half of the novel explains Saleem’s backstory, going as far back as to when his grandparents met and fell in love. Their marriage begins with the hope of new love, but soon devolves into a toxic relationship. In one instance, we learn of Naseem’s cruelty to Aadam by refusing to feed him due to their differences in how to raise their children. The two constantly disagree on nearly every subject, leading Naseem to take a three year vow of silence. Saleem’s mother also experiences dissatisfaction with her husband. When Saleem talks about his parents’ marriage, he reveals that his mother had to force herself to fall in love with her husband, focusing on one piece of his appearance or personality at a time, eerily similar to the way in which Saleem’s grandparents fell in love. Still, there are parts of Ahmed that Amina can’t love no matter how hard she tries. She also continually expresses her distaste over the estate they buy from Methwold, yet Ahmed ignores her complaints and forces her to move in anyway. Even Padma experiences unhappiness in her relationship with Saleem due to the lack of sexual intercourse between them. For now, I’m unsure of why Saleem won’t engage with Padma. Is he not attracted to her? Is he disinterested in that act? Or does he feel as if he can’t perform that act because he feels as if he is actually falling apart?

While not a major aspect of Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie uses a very simple technique to convey time periods within his narratives in both the novel and his essay, “Imaginary Homelands.” In the novel, when Saleem refers to the present day from which he is telling the story he uses present tense to convey this. One such example would be at the beginning of the second chapter, “Mercurochrome,” where Saleem’s wife is attempting to get him to eat: “She attempts to cajole me from my desk: “Eat, na, food is spoiling.” I remain stubbornly hunched over paper.” As soon as Saleem returns to talking about the past, he switches to past tense. It is a small detail, but one that cleverly clues the reader into what time period they are reading about. Rushdie does the exact same thing in “Imaginary Homelands,” framing the essay by describing a scene in his office in present tense before launching into his explanation of his childhood and the inspiration for Midnight’s Children. He could either be doing this as an example of the technique he likes to use or as a nod to the novel, but in either case the reader experiences the same effect. By switching between past and present tense, Rushdie creates a sort of cognitive divide, a subconscious indicator of when an event is taking place and making it easier to organize and interpret an extremely fragmented narrative. 

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a work of fiction that parallels the history of India as it gains it’s independence from Britain. The first part of the book describes the years leading up to Saleem Sinai’s birth. 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). We have already discussed that fragmentation is a major theme in both the modernism and post-modernism era. To be honest, while reading book one of Midnight’s Children I kept wondering where the story and the plot was going. One minute we are talking about a doctor inspecting a patient through a perforated sheet, then we seem to be on another story. Meanwhile, the narrator Saleem is referencing encounters with his wife (Padma) in what appears to be current time. I was very confused.

            Okay, so it seems like we are getting fragments of people and stories that lead to Saleem’s birth and build/ sculpt Saleem into the person he will be. And, through these fragments, we are also receiving a little bit of India’s history, which leads us to the birth of Saleem and India’s independence. Personally, I think book one could have been summarized into a couple of pages; BUT, I see that this fragmented history plays a big role in the entirety of Saleem’s story.

The point of view of this novel is in first person narrative. The narrative is mostly subjective, though omniscience third person narrative is used through the motives and thoughts of the other major characters. The narrative focuses on Saleem Sinai, who is claiming to be phsically falling apart due to the haunting of his past. The story is mostly spread out around the different years of his life, which creates a fragmentary nature of his identity. There is a constant battle with Saleem’s past and present as the narrative takes us back and forth throughout the novel. India as a whole is also fragmented; it is divided into two separate countries. East and west Pakistan are classified as separate countries. New nationalities have been created, in turn this brings in a new form of cultural identity and keeps the constant separation and divide. 

In the first chapter of the book, there seems to be allusions to the Bible. The grandfather Aadam, could suggest Adam. He was the first man in the Bible and this story happens to be the first of the novel. Kashmir is described as beautiful and lush, like the Garden of Eden. The next few chapters are like mini stories such as in the Bible, but instead of there being one ultimate “God”, it feels like more of an… omniscient being or maybe like a supernatural universe force.