Micah Phua is a writer and editor, passionate about stories that inform as much as they entertain.
Academic
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Capstone Paper - English literature
Ambivalence in Midnight’s Children:
Saleem Sinai’s Narrative Failure as Postmodern Success Story
In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem Sinai, attempts to do the impossible—that is, to wrest control of his life’s story and to tell it with a sense of singular purpose and eminence. This proves impossible because his narrative is fundamentally flawed. His story ventures forth as a form of discursive resistance, but eventually fails (and in some cases, even concedes defeat on a metafictional level) to simultaneously claim agency over his own life, and do justice to the multitude of voices he encounters, including the story of the nation of India at large, since much of his life parallels key events in the country’s independence. This failure is primarily an exercise in being “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha, 130). Midnight’s Children, read through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” reveals the futile pursuit of identity inherent in the vastly ambivalent relationship of discourse between the coloniser and colonised on two levels—Saleem’s own life journey and his life as national allegory for India (Bhabha, 130). Certain parts of the text help outline the fact that Saleem’s attempts at historiography is always at odds with his role as the “colonised,” namely, Saleem’s family’s residency in the Methwold Estate, which paves the way for his birth and the birth of the rest of the midnight children, and the circumstances leading up to his death, including the State of Emergency declared by Indira Ghandi. He cannot escape the rich and tortured history of his country and its many citizens, and his narrative necessarily breaks down over the course of the novel because of this. Saleem’s inevitable failure to properly narrate the full extent of his own life, as itself or as national 2 allegory, affirms the subversive and problematic threat to identity whose roots Bhabha argues run deep in the coloniser-colonised relationship, but also serves as a helpful test case for proving the postmodern condition of narrative, whereby small stories—the numerous other narratives that are entwined with Saleem’s—resist domination by master narratives.
...
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Saleem Sinai’s Narrative Failure as Postmodern Success Story
In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem Sinai, attempts to do the impossible—that is, to wrest control of his life’s story and to tell it with a sense of singular purpose and eminence. This proves impossible because his narrative is fundamentally flawed. His story ventures forth as a form of discursive resistance, but eventually fails (and in some cases, even concedes defeat on a metafictional level) to simultaneously claim agency over his own life, and do justice to the multitude of voices he encounters, including the story of the nation of India at large, since much of his life parallels key events in the country’s independence. This failure is primarily an exercise in being “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha, 130). Midnight’s Children, read through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” reveals the futile pursuit of identity inherent in the vastly ambivalent relationship of discourse between the coloniser and colonised on two levels—Saleem’s own life journey and his life as national allegory for India (Bhabha, 130). Certain parts of the text help outline the fact that Saleem’s attempts at historiography is always at odds with his role as the “colonised,” namely, Saleem’s family’s residency in the Methwold Estate, which paves the way for his birth and the birth of the rest of the midnight children, and the circumstances leading up to his death, including the State of Emergency declared by Indira Ghandi. He cannot escape the rich and tortured history of his country and its many citizens, and his narrative necessarily breaks down over the course of the novel because of this. Saleem’s inevitable failure to properly narrate the full extent of his own life, as itself or as national 2 allegory, affirms the subversive and problematic threat to identity whose roots Bhabha argues run deep in the coloniser-colonised relationship, but also serves as a helpful test case for proving the postmodern condition of narrative, whereby small stories—the numerous other narratives that are entwined with Saleem’s—resist domination by master narratives.
...
(Read more)