The Literature of exile and imaginary homelands in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children - Essay Example

He is born into the world of the narrative, but is also its creator, its parent. The proliferation of births Therefore, Saleem Sinai operates in a dual role, working both on the same level of reality as the other characters in the story and on a higher narrative position than that on which the events take place. His voice and his narratorial rendition of reality is polyphonic and, aware of the multiplicity of interpretations, he explicitly refuses to separate them: For the sake of their privacy, I am refusing to distinguish the voices from one another; and for other reasons.

For one thing, my narrative could not cope with five hundred and eighty-one fully-rounded personalities; for another, the children [.] remained, to my mind, a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity, and I see no point in dividing them now. (Midnight's Children 274) The voices and personalities Rushdie refers to constitute a network of one thousand and one subjectivities, the children all born during the very first hour of renascent India, all sharing the capability of telepathical communication, all being able to speak with each other.

This narrative technique echoes the novel's motif of the twin (a frequent motif in Rushdie's work) - the twins babies born at the same time, the twin births, the twinning of the subjectivity of Saleem and India. These Manichean oppositions, the resultant Bogumilic perspective, opens up the novel's perspective (and opens up the notion of a single subjective author or narrator) to many voices, crossing geography, ethnicity, class, caste, religious affiliation, and gender. It allows for a plurality of perspective.

The essay “The Literature of exile and imaginary homelands in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses” outlines a national identity’s representation. There is a lived reality of national identity, but it is a reality lived in representation and reiteration, a constant creation and amelioration of the individual's existence. In “Midnight’s Children” Rushdie rewrites the history of India as a gesture toward creating a national narrative. The story of India unfolds through or in connection to the story of Saleem Sinai, the thirty-year old narrator of the novel, born “on the stroke of midnight” on August 15, 1947, the moment of India's independence.

The role of fragmentation in the formation of identity applies to nations in Rushdie’s novels particularly India. The fragmentation of the large British colonial territory into Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, whose cultural, religious, political, and linguistic traditions differ, constitutes an impressively intricate and intimidating task. The Satanic Verses involves the same play with traditional narrative as Rushdie’s earlier novels. Rushdie writes the novel as a sequence of dreams and nightmares from Gibreel Farishta mind.

Salman Rushdie's work shows how representations of reality are created and received within a certain social, political, historical, religious, and geographical context. His novels suggest that the objectivity ascribed by the Western world to historiography, for example, is itself part of the fiction.