Haroun and the Sea of Stories

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FOIL CHARACTERS SHOW: THE VALUE OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH Imagine a world without the freedom of speech. Imagine a place where you weren’t allowed to say anything that you wanted, but instead were told what you had to say. Imagine that you weren’t allowed to share your thoughts and ideas. Would you really like to live a life that way? In ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories' Rushdie uses the literary device foil characters to convey the theme of importance of freedom of speech. Rushdie has not been given a lot of freedom to express his thoughts and ideas in his life and therefore he uses his books to send this message. He shows in this story that expressing your thoughts and feelings freely is vital and bring you success in life. Important, foil characters in this story that represent this theme are: Rashid vs. Mr. Sengupta, Gups vs. Chups, and General Kitab vs. Khattam-Shud. Salman Rushdie shows through the character Rashid’s eyes the value that freedom of speech holds and through the character Mr. Sengupta’s eyes what happens when you don’t value it. In the beginning of the story, Rushdie uses Mr. Sengupta to represent the character who does not support the freedom of speech. “Life is not a storybook or joke shop. All this fun will come to no good. What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” says Mr. Sengupta. (Rushdie 20) This quote shows that Mr. Sengupta believes that stories have no value and it is a waste of time to tell stories. This shows that he does not believe in the idea of expressing your thoughts freely. Rashid believes that expressing your thoughts is vital in life. “However, there were people who thought Rashid’s stories were useful.” (Rushdie 20) This quote shows that Rashid was a storyteller and that there were people really appreciated him and his thoughts. Politicians would call Rashid to tell stories because they thought that he had a magic
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