Alex Lotti

Salman Rushdie’s careful syntax characterizes Saleem Sinai’s thought process with phrases that are long even for run-on sentences. I compared his form to Virginia Woolf in a previous post, noting that the styles of each author are reminiscent of but not quite stream-of-consciousness. Now, however, with the ends of both Book 2 and Book 3 in Midnight’s Children each featuring a passage made up of a single sentence lasting approximately two pages, I am inclined to argue that the most emotionally-charged moments of Saleem’s story are dedicated to this literary method.

The way Rushdie neglects punctuation between disparate thoughts and memories, specifically at the end of Book 2, creates the effect of extreme speed as they all come rushing at Saleem, one immediately after another. Cramming them all together forces the reader’s mind to race, as any normal human’s naturally would, in a time of crisis where comprehension tries desperately to keep up with instinct. The entire scene sticks exactly to what goes through his head as he writes, and there is no better scene to emphasize with stream-of-consciousness, because reflecting on the time he witnessed the brutal destruction of his family calls for the rawest of methods to express the awful memory.