Midnights Children essay :: essays research papers

Midnights Children essaySalman Rushdies creation, Saleem Sinai, has a self-proclaimed "overpowering require for form" (363). In writing his cause autobiography Saleem seems to be by and by what Frank Kermode says every writer is a after concordance. Concordance would deed over Saleem to bring meaning to moments in the "middest" by elucidating (or creating) their coherence with moments in the foregone and future. While Kermode talks about providing this order primarily through an "imaginatively predicted future" (8), Saleem approaches the project by ordering everything in his past into neat, causal relationships, with each event a result of what preceded it. While he is a great deal skeptical of the true order of the past, he never doubts its eminence he is certain that everyone is "handcuffed to history" (482). His belief in the preeminence of the past, though, is distinctly divergent than the reality of time for the Saleem who emerges through that part of the novel that Gerard Genette calls "the event that consists of soulfulness recounting something" (26) (Saleem-now, we can call this figure). Saleem-now is motivated to act not by the past, but instead by the uncertainty and ambiguity of the future. Saleems construction of his own story is an effort to mitigate the lack of control he feels in looking toward the unknown future. To pacify himself he creates a world that is tenacious but this world is contrary to his own reality. Saleem spends much of his energy in the story setting up neat causal relationships between events in his past to demonstrate his place "at the revolve about of things" (272). He guardedly mentions his tumble into the middle of a parade for the partition of Bombay and then replication to propose that "in this government agency I became directly responsible for triggering sullen the violence which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay" (219). When telling us of his school-mate Cyrus slicing from school and emergence as a great religious vaticinator Saleem quickly mentions the Superman comics that he had given Cyrus earlier, and attributes Cyrus rise to prophetdom as a direct response to these comics. By viewing Cyrus motivation in this way Saleem says "I found myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of my turbulent, fabulous world" (309). in that location is an obvious note of skepticism toward these most overt acts of placing himself at the center of things. At one point he asks himself "am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that Im prepared to distort everythingto re-write the full-length history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?