Salman Rushdie is known for his books: Midnight’s Children (Booker Prize winner) and Satanic Verses, which is banned in many countries because it blasphemes Islam.
The story begins with the independence of India on August 15, 1945. Salim Sinai, the main character, comes out of his mother’s womb at exactly 12 o’clock in the morning when the radios proclaim: India has made an appointment with destiny.
The story is written using technical realism.
Salim Sinai is a special boy endowed with psychic abilities. Apart from him, there are several others who have the gift of clairvoyance.
I would like to continue my analysis using: existential philosophy, psychoanalysis, postmodernism and Marxism.
point of view from existentialism
Salim Sinai is a fictitious self who tries to project history and culture from an exaggerated individualism. The fictional self is Sartre’s glorification of being for himself. The story has abrupt time changes that don’t connect with each other. The present in the novel is his relationship with Padma his wife. He likes to put down her wife by calling her the Goddess of Manure. The past is a narrative about the independence of the Indians. Words become cultural monuments to shape the storyteller’s world. When reading the novel one is forced to experience a forceful romanticism. Born into a wealthy aristocratic family, life is quite comfortable for Sinai. From an existential standpoint, it’s hard to give poetic license to the narrator’s rendezvous with ESP. The writer’s self is biased with a myriad of thoughts.
Psychoanalysis
We find instances in the story where the protagonist suffers from the chronic nourishment of the Oedipus complex. Padma, his wife, becomes a mother figure. The story becomes a male camera, displaying the nuances of reality within a surreal lens. The character of the narrator is one of self-sufficient narcissism. Rushdie wants to escape the feeling of an average Joe? Looking at the story from an archetypal point of view we find that the actor in the story is a Scaramouch. The relationships in the novel are marked by a tense irony. The motif a clown tries to synchronize the story with the fable in a witch’s cauldron. Interesting is the portrait of Adam Aziz, the grandfather of Sinai who is a doctor who has come from Germany and who has an excellent practice in Kashmir. He has totally absorbed the culture of the West. His marriage to Salim’s grandmother is so funny. Rushdie is a beast with vitriolic humor. There is a tendency to utter disappearing comments about various characters. Is clairvoyance a voice of hope or a chain of frustration? These are questions that can be drawn from psychoanalysis.
Marxism
Looking at the novel from a Marxist perspective: one has to accept that the novelist’s writing is a bourgeois trick, an aristocratic trick. The harsh reality of a newly emerged India is more of a crutch that could have deserved more attention. The novel’s settings are aristocratic and there is little mention of the proletariat. There is TAI, the boatman. TAI is situated in the fiction of the exotic.
postmodernism
The flight of cultural images is involved in a mismatch of cultural signifiers. Reading the history of independence in the novel, one must deconstruct the misrepresentation of History. The narrative is shallow and meanders with contrasting meanings. Aristocracy as bourgeois narcissism has to be deconstructed from a cultural perspective.