One of the things I connected ot this book between the themes of the class and what we’ve previously read is the power of selective memory. In Alias Grace, we see that Grace doesn’t remember the day of the killings yet it was obviously one of the most important moments in her life that’s had a huge effect on her and the direction of her life. This gets to me because like Saleem in Midnight’s Children, it raises the question of memorizing important things and  the memory of important things. I feel like that’s not only an important trait of good novels, but also just an important trait to highlight in humans in general. Think about this, the doctor needs to get an accurate story from Grace, who’s already given him two or three accounts of what happened, all of them differing substantially. This reminds me of almost any important story in the history of human kind where there are different interpretations where there absolutely shouldn’t be any. The religious myths, and even a story of a child is subject to shifting memory, whether malicious with intent or not, the fact that we base our reality on something that shifts like quicksand is remarkable, especially when it has something to do with our emotions and how we feel. 

Alias Grace is already becoming one of my favorite books in the series. You have the titular character, Grace Marks, who is a member of an insane asylum. But the interesting thing is that for the 70 pages or so, Grace seems so normal. When we tend to portray people who are insane, people tend to think about some guy screaming to himself while running around and just being an absolute cartoon. Grace however is very cognizant and very self aware of her surroundings and people who she interact with. For instance, while meeting the Doctor for the first time, she could immediately sense that he had motives, and so deliberately lied about what she was feeling and what she thought so she could stay under the radar. Grace even looks at all of the other patients and can tell you which ones are really truly insane and which ones are just seasonally insane. It’s a look into the mind of the character, and if you had no prior knowledge about the character or if the book didn’t tell you first hand why she was in the asylum, you probably wouldn’t even realized that she had murdered someone. She seems so normal if not a little bit anxious and skittish.

I’ve been looking up a few of the Hindu texts and looking through the Hindu creation myths, we come to Shiva. Shiva is one of the three gods in Hindu mythology, the others being Brahma the creator, and Vishnu the preserver while Shiva is considered the destroyer. Shiva in Midnight’s Children is also a war hero and is a parallel to the Hindu mythology as he is effectively the destroyer of the Midnight’s Children. In my mind, the parallel’s are this, Aadam would be the parallel to Brahma as he is the creator of Saleem’s universe, Brahma would parallel Saleem as Saleem effectively brought the Midnight’s Children together into a cohesive group, and Shiva would effectively be the destroyer as he was the end of the group. You could also parallel it to India as in the Hindu myths, the idea of creation, perservation and destruction exist in a continuous cycle.

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.

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. 

One of the major points of Rushdies Imaginary Homelands is the idea of living in the past. But the difference between this essay and the other works we have read is that he isn’t necessarily sad about the past, he’s more nostalgic. In a lot of pop psychology and Buddhist literature, It is seen that one should only live in the present as living in the past will create a longing that’s not only not based in reality, but is also based from a biased point of view. In essence, you’re living in the past but that’s only in your head.  He also asks a paradoxical question. “What does it mean to be Indian outside of India?” It begs a question thstbRushdie is getting at, everything changes shape based on a point of view that can’t ever be touched, he’s being haunted by identity of past, and even though he doesnt see anythi g wrong with it, he’s self aware enough to know he’s only seeing it the way he wants to see the past.

The Demon Lover brings back conventions that we’ve seen in the themes in the overall class, and in some of the stories that we’ve read this semester. The Demon Lover goes down a list of the haunting tropes. First and formost, Kathleen gets a letter that has no explanation for being there. The only idea that makes sense is illogical within itself. This leaves room for the mystery that adds into many haunting pieces, the idea of the unknown and not being able to tell if that unknown is a threat or not. She also made a promise to an old soldier who is presumed dead. Thirdly, when Kathleen finally gets into the taxi, she realizes almost immediately that the taxi seems to know where it’s going without her input. This brings back that sense of the unknown. Also from a writing perspective, the idea that it is unknown what happens to Kathleen at the end of the story adds to the haunting and supernatural aspect of the story. What is the driver of the taxi’s motives? If the motives were good, there would be no reason to frighten her previous lover yet in dramatic fashion, he decides to drive off with Kathleen in the backseat, at one point, stopping in a fashion that hurts her. This is also talked about in the story as it’s said that the Soldier didn’t love her. Maybe his apathy and lack of care has come back at as a different force? This also harks back to the stories that we’ve read in the earlier semester as Mrs. Dalloway was haunted by people from her past.