Change Of Character In Salaman Rushdie'S &Amp;Quot;Midnight'S Children&Amp;Quot;

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Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children is one of the most acclaimed books to emerge from Indian Diaspora. At once the personal tale of the book’s narrator, Saleem Sinai, it is also the story of India’s creation; the ups and downs of Sinai’s life echo the rise and fall of India. Midnight’s Children is perhaps Rushdie’s greatest work, winner of both the Booker and Booker of Bookers prizes, and the range of styles and meanings within the novel have caused it to be described by some theorists as: “at once an autobiographical bildungsroman, a picaresque fiction, a political allegory, a topical satire, a comic extravaganza, a surrealist fantasy, and a daring experiment in form and style” (Naik and Narayan, 2001, page 39). In the course of the novel, all these features are employed to undermine the author, the history he offers, and even the nature of fiction-writing itself. This essay will begin by considering some of the themes of the novel, and the stylistic approach of Rushdie’s postmodernism, it will then move onto an examination of Saleem, the narrator and protagonist of the story; his story-telling, his physical body, and his history being the source of much of the disturbance of regular authorship found in the book. This will naturally lead on to a discussion of how Midnight’s Children destabilises the notions of ‘historiography’, authenticity, and the reliability of the author/narrator. A conclusion will then consider whether the novel can be regarded as revealing an unstable subject. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is set in India, in the years between 1915 to 1978; the largest portion of the novel concentrates upon the years after Independence (1947). The author recounts the story of his ancestors, which are later shown to not be his ancestors, in the thirty-two years before his birth, and the thirty-one years after. Saleem is born at midnight on the

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