Midnights Children essay :: essays research papers

Midnights Children essaySalman Rushdies creation, Saleem Sinai, has a self-proclaimed "overpowering desire for shit" (363). In writing his own autobiography Saleem seems to be after what unmannerly Kermode says every writer is a after concordance. Concordance would allow Saleem to involve meaning to moments in the "middest" by elucidating (or creating) their coherence with moments in the past tense and next. slice 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 separately event a result of what preceded it. While he is frequently quizzical of the true order of the past, he never doubts its eminence he is current that everyone is "handcuffed to hi drool" (482). His belief in the preeminence of the past, though, is distinctly different than the public of time for the Saleem who emerges throu gh that part of the novel that Gerard Genette calls "the event that consists of someone recount something" (26) (Saleem-now, we can call this figure). Saleem-now is motivated to act not by the past, only when instead by the uncertainty and ambiguity of the future. Saleems construction of his own write up is an effort to mitigate the lack of control he feels in looking at toward the unknown future. To pacify himself he creates a world that is ordered tho 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 center of things" (272). He carefully mentions his autumn into the middle of a parade for the partition of Bombay and then proceeds to image that "in this way I became toply responsible for triggering off the rage which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay" (219). When telling us of his take-mate Cyrus disa ppearance from school and emergence as a great religious prophet Saleem chop-chop 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 tack together myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of my turbulent, fabulous world" (309). There is an taken for granted(predicate) 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-off gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that Im prepared to distort everythingto re-write the whole fib of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?