Narrative in Midnight's Children
The Culmination of Stylistic Development in Narrative and Plot
Sep 23, 2009
Rushdie draws a lucid and perfectly crafted parallel to the politics and geography of India after Independence through his main protagonist, Saleem Sinai, who is both character and narrator, as the bulk of Midnight's Children is written by Sinai, as his autobiography, a technique which enables Rushdie to twist and manipulate his fiction into a beautifully rich tapestry of the real and the not-so-real.
Triumph in Narrative
This idea of metafictional narrative is by no means unique, it was used to devastating effect by Atwood in Handmaid's Tale, and much earlier examples include The Turn of the Screw, where James tells the story through a character, however it would not be too preemptory to claim that Rushdie has perfected it. Rushdie uses the throes of Saleem the Narrator to twist the expectations of the novel, addressing memory particularly as a siren of the author.
What Rushdie primarily does is take the elements of humanity which a novel is supposed to describe: sickness, the nature of memory, the corruption of human emotion, and not only weaves it into the plot, but also the narrative. Rushdie's form and syntax become as eloquent as his vocabulary. Saleem The Narrator becomes as flawed and as human as the rest of us, in stark contrast to the usual omniscience we have come to expect from the novel genre, where Saleem did not actually see the event, he interjects possibilities disguising them as the truth, a beautiful effect characteristic of Rushdie and his earlier works.
Film within Fiction
A Tangible part of Rushdie's narrative is the idea of using film instructions as narrative, using terminology such as 'pan' and 'montage', tapping into the Western obssession with the motion picture, and allowing a perfect visualisation for the reader, and the implied knowledge that this is, of course, fiction.
But then it is not. Rushdie is with one hand giving us the knowledge that everything he writes is fictional, apparently straying away from Henry James' mantra that authors should try in no way to detract from reality. In fact the effect of ths obvious-fictionalisation is to intensify the reader's invested belief in the veracity of the situation, thanks to the narratorial set-up, one can put any kind of stylish inflections and impossibilities of the plot down to Saleem the Narrator, as his interpretation of the truth.
The effects of this are unparalleled. Rushdie hammers home the structure of Indian politics so gently as to present the perfect paradox. The reader can barely understand what has happened to him before he is dragged into a story, so rich in its myriad possibilities and implications. Perfect.
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