Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Midnight's Children

by Salmon Rushdie

21 comments:

  1. I think this book is pretty interesting so far. The language is beautiful. I wonder how Tai is going to connect to the rest of the story, and I also want to here more of the narrator's story rather then the story of his grandfather. In comparison to the beginnings of other books we have read, this one is not as interesting as say Oscar Wao. Why did the author do that?

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  2. In the beginning of this story the narrator uses a lot of detail and stories to describe his grandfather...Is this because his grandfather was an important figure in the narraotr's life? I alos agree with Juliana saying that the beginning of this book isn't as interesting or catching as some other stories, but it's still good.

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  3. Salman Rushdie writes this novel almost like a autobiography, first explaining his family members that have impacted him greatly and made him who he became, and then entering the details of his own life. By the end of the first 86 pages, the narrator, Saleem Sinai, has just begun to mention his own birth and life, and has instead focused the entirety of the opening of "his story" with a detailed description of his grandfather, the marriage of his grandparents, and the marriage of his parents. On page 84 Saleem says that "from the moment of my conception, it seems, I have been public property," which I think is implicitly demonstrated by the fact that Saleem talks so much about his family indicating that his life has been formed by others, since way before he was born, and from the announcement of his conception he has already had a life set out for him.
    I also find it interesting that Rushdie has written this novel as if Saleem is talking to the audience telling a story (to Padma-- his wife??) making Saleem seem like an old man re-telling his life story. This format makes the story seem more realistic and more like an autobiography.

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  4. I agree with Eva that this story is easy to relate to because I think that is why Rushdie writes it the way he does. He switches off from telling personal stories to telling the history of his family, but also the world. I think the connection between major events in the story and major events in his family’s history make an interesting connection between how personal life can relate to the greater world. For example, the narrator’s grandmother breaks a vow of silence she held for a really long time on the same day the united States dropped the atomic bombs in Japan (p. 64).

    This book has also periodically made me actually laugh out loud. I think its funny how the grandmother, Naseem, often refers to things as “whatsitsname” because it’s a random thing to throw into this book that’s so focused on history. Naseem begins to say this when she is protesting her husband’s efforts to make her act more modern. I wonder if this is supposed to be come kind of metaphor for India’s slow modernization or reluctance to accept change of some kind. I am really interested to see how Padma begins to play a role, as she already is a seemingly mother-like figure.

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  5. In our latest reading we covered a lot of content and many major events were explained, including the birth of the narrator. I found it very amusing that he has played up his own birth so much, but then again that was a reflection from everyone around him, while he was growing up. Personally, I would feel a little conceited if I kept mentioning "how great I am", or "how I'm bound to do noble things." However, I think the repeated idea that Saleem has been prophesied and is "the chosen one" represents an exaggeration on the theme that everyone has an impact, everyone is special and everyone makes changes on those around them, either through their words, actions or choices. Building on that theme gives an explanation as to why it took the narrator nearly 100 pages to actually be born. By giving so much background about his family before his birth he is implicitly saying that it is the people who he was around, and the philosophies he grew up with, were a major contributor to who he became when he got older. I think this idea is clearly shown in our everyday society in many cases. For example, children often grow up having the same political views as their parents, same religions as their parents, or will raise their own children with the same methods they grew up with. I believe the evolution of society in general is (mostly) based on how people interact with each other and how people thrive off of competing, and working with others.

    Also, just on a quick note, similarly to Juliana, this book has made me laugh out-loud or make some other noise of surprise because many of the events seem to come out of no-where. It will be a little slow then suddenly the narrator will pull out a detail about his life that totally turns your view of him around: like when you find out he's not actually the biological child of Amina and Ahmed.

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  6. I agree with what both of you have said. So far the book has been very slow going, though it seems to be picking up now. In the beginning the narrator packed a lot of detail into all the sentences he could. So much detail made it hard to follow the plot and figure out who the characters were. However, now that we seem to have gotten some of the details out of the way, the plot is beginning to pick up and the characters relationships are becoming clearer. I'm pretty sure that the detail and description that made this book so slow at first is going to pay of later on when the plot picks up. Knowing all this backstory and detail will help us assess characters choices, keep up with the narrative, and give us insight into motives and characteristics of the cast.
    Also, a style trend that I've noticed is that Rushdie tends to interrupt himself (or at least the narrator does). He'll begin telling the story in a specific direction and then will stop himself and go into an anecdote that he's been reminded of. The anecdote can be anywhere in time and sometimes that can make the style a little difficult to follow. In this way the narrative so far has been very 'stream of consciousness' in its style. The narrator will explain something and then be reminded of something else and then tell us that to and eventually get back to what he was saying before.

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  7. Also dancingdemon is Hannah (though that's pretty obvious because its a 3 person group), I'm still trying to figure out how to make it come up as my name....

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  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  9. I agree with Hannah because the book seems like it is written like a stream of thoughts. I also agree with Eva, however I also think it’s important to note that while the people around him influenced him, he also influenced them. It seemed interesting to me that everyone was so focused on this one kid, when there were plenty of others who were also born at the same time. If we also remember that the babies were switched, it is really weird to me that this child is supposedly the chosen one when it was the baby that Amina was carrying that was supposed to be the chosen one.

    Furthermore, I found the Snakes and Ladders chapter to be really interesting. I personally loved that game as a child so I could relate to Saleem’s love of this game. I also think the snakes and ladders are a metaphor for something. In the game, the snakes always make you lose by acting like a slide, so I took that to be a reference to bad things or evil. The ladder would thus represent good, as the ladders in the game always help you to accomplish something and are good. For example, the snake in the movie theatre was not an actual snake, but the death of Gandhi. I think Rushdie was trying to show all the evil in the world and how it is really intertwined with good, just like snakes and ladders in the game are so intertwined.

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  10. I have ben really enjoying this story so far partly because of the plot but also because of the way the story is told. I agree with Hannah when said the story is like "a stream of consciousness" because I think that's exactly how this story is told , and I think this style is partly why I am enjoying this book so much because I can relate to this way of thinking because that's how I think sometimes.
    I especially liked this last section we have read because we finally get to hear about some of the other "midnight children" and the "psychic powers" that they all possess. I have noticed that the more excited the narrator gets about the events he's describing the quicker and more interesting they become. The narrator sometimes speaks to us (the audience) through Padma, and right now he refuses to even wait until his fever dies down because he is eager to detail how his rivalry with Shiva will go, and how his connections with the other children unfold.
    One thing I think is very interesting is that, we know Saleem can hear others thoughts but when he penetrates deep enough into the mind, the other person can also communicate back to him. Also, as far as I know Saleem is the only one who has been connecting the children, so do they now all know of each other's existence because they are all in Saleem's head at the same time? Or has Slaeem just told everyone of them individually of the others and they believe him and trust him?

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  11. I agree with Eva because I also really like the author’s writing style. I think it’s really interesting how the narrator incorporates the history of India into his story. I also think that this part was interesting, like Eva said, as a result of the discovery of the other children who were born at.
    I think that character development in this story is interesting. The other characters don’t seem to be that important to Saleem with the exception of a few. I found it weird that so much emphasis was placed on the foreigner who came and lived on the hill with Saleem and his friends.
    The last thing I found very fascinating was the last chapter. This idea of the widow that was tearing a part claws was really weird. In the last chapter, Saleem said, “ ‘ I told you the truth…Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his won’” (242). To me this was the most thoughtful idea presented in this section. I completely agree and it reminds me a lot of the conversation we had about truth when we were reading short stories. I think that memory greatly impacts what we conceive as truth, so you can never really tell if anyone is telling the truth, because you could have seen it in such a different way.

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  12. I think its interesting that both of you seem to like the stream of consciousness style that Rushdie is employing because you feel you can relate to it (at least thats what Eva said). Its funny because I think that stream of consciousness can sometimes be more difficult to understand because it is just that, a stream of consciousness, and since we're on the outside of his head and can only see what he writes down, its like hearing half a telephone conversation. Anyways, personally I'm not a huge fan of the storytelling style of this particular novel (though O'Brien also wrote in a very thought streaming way and I liked his book). However, the plot is beginning to pick up and I'm beginning to get interested in the characters. For example (and this is jumping backwards in the book some), the whole nature of the grandparents relationship and how they fell in love with each other in bits, literally. I think its a very interesting social message that Rushdie is trying to elaborate on about the nature of love and why people fall in and out of love. Unfortunately I have yet to figure out what exactly he's trying to say so I'll simply leave that there for you to ponder. Also, did anyone else think that the grandmother was kind of similar to the mother in Like Water For Chocolate, with her qualities of cruelty (although its a very interesting mixture of cruelty and justice). She's transformed to a woman who feels that she's always at war with the world and that she has to fight to gain every little inch and so she comes of as harsh when she tries to prove a point or win a fight (like when she didn't give food to her husband for several days). This story's definitely picking up and I'm excited to see what happens next.

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  13. I thought it interesting that in this section our narrator began to tell of his "downfall" or the dramatic changes in his life that seemed to be the deterioration of all he had known. Saleem's finger tip gets cut off and he keeps using it as a metaphor to show how one little change (one finger tip missing) can alter more than ever thought possible (produce a fountain of blood). Every event that occurs after Saleem's incident he relates back to his missing finger: his aunts breakdown (286), how his sister usurped his position as 'favorite child' (290), and the slow break-up of the Midnight Children's Conference (291). I thought this was interesting because it seems to me that the way the narrator is telling the story is that he believes that everything in his life is connected, and has a purpose, has destiny, therefore every event that occurs is partly his fault or connected o him in some way. Kind of like how he dreamed of "killing" (even though it wasn't really his fault) Jimmy Kapadia and then he woke up and Jimmy was dead, of a cause completely independent of Saleem, but Saleem still blamed himself saying " Is it possible to kill a human being by dreaming his death? ... My mother always said so; and, in that case, Jimmy was my first murder victim" (285).

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  14. Hannah, I understand that it can be hard to understand, because truthfully it really is hard to follow at points. Really what I think of this type of narration is that it makes the not as interesting points a little more interesting because they are also more personal.

    On another note, I think Saleem is right in thinking that everything he does has purpose, because if you really generalize what Eva said, basically your saying that actions have consequences, which is really how I saw what Saleem was saying. His finger being split open lead to a lot of things because it first showed the parents that he is not really their child because he has a different blood type (“ ‘Neither A nor O. And the rhesus factor: impossibly negative…’”(269)), which makes his father think his mother cheated, which makes his father like him less, thus making his sister the favorite. The actions that are related to his family make a lot more sense; however what I found really weird is that he can make a connection to India’s history though the events in his life. For example, when he is talking about how just the little tip of his finger had been cut off and “blood (neither Alpha or Omega) rushed out in fountains, a similar thing happened in history”(273), in reference to the elections and the following protests. I wonder if Rushdie is trying to send a message about how people look at their country’s history and maybe even saying that in a small way, we all affect the outcome of what happens.

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  15. I agree with what Juliana has said about everyone in a country adding to and affecting a country as a whole. A country is made up of its citizens and therefore the citizen's actions create the events of history. However it is interesting that Saleem takes this view and (in my opinion) gives much more credit to himself. After causing two murders indirectly he says, "But Commander Sabarmati was only the puppet; I was the puppet-master, and the nation preformed my play" (300) giving himself the majority of the credit for the history that followed instead of solely having a small part in the whole event.

    I thought this most recent reading was pretty crazy, there were many deaths, Amina left Ahmed to go to Pakistan and Saleem personally witnessed the exile of the president of Pakistan (333). However what I thought was most interesting was that we as an audience finally hear the real name of the narrator’s sister. Before, his sister was always called "the Brass Monkey" but on page 335 during her 14th birthday "the brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name" and "was known after that as Jamila Singer" (336). I think that the narrator is using his sister’s name to mark her stages in life, just as he uses India’s history and his telepathy to mark the stages in his own life.

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  16. I'm not sure if I quite agree with you. He was pretty much responsible for Commander Sabarmati ever finding out about the affair. As Saleem admits, "I glued my completed note...inserted my completed not into the inside pocket of his spare uniform"(298), where it is clear that he was pretty much responsible for the events of that period.

    Also, I think its weird that there is so much clear good and evil in the story, and that really it is only "good" according to Saleem. i do think Saleem is an extremely selfish narrator, but he is also young so it is easily understandable.

    Ms. Jones, I know this is late, but my computer was broken last night and I didn't have time to do this post this morning.

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  17. As we come to the end of this novel I have realized that Rushdie has divided this book into clear stages of Saleem's life, that are each fairly different from the last. In this last section of the book Saleem explains about his "re-birth" or as he called it his "purifying." Saleem explains how he is purified through the complete annihilation of his family from the bombs of the India-Pakistan war. Saleem narrates, "before I am striped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head and acquiesce yes...and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems go pouring out of me" (392). I thought this was a very important passage because it shows that Saleem quietly accepts his fate believing it part of his destiny just like every other thing that happens in his life. Instead of crying or being upset that his entire family was murdered from a series of bombs, he looses all feeling and starts his life over again, with nothing but the gift of sent. This way of accepting his fate was very different from atonement in his past, Saleem usually accepts the events in his life and moves on, but this time he disconnects himself from reality, like he is no longer the same person. This might show that everyone has a limit to what they can comprehend, but that everyone has their own ways of dealing with their lives, and for Saleem that would be relying on the major characteristic that makes him who he is-- his nose.

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  18. I agree with Eva, and adding on, I really like how you can see Saleem’s growth and development from boy to adult. At the beginning of the story, he was already mature beyond his years, as you can see when he tries to make his fellow Midnight Children “immune to their parents…the prejudices and world-views of adults” (292), where the children are having the fights that the adults are having over race and social class. However, at the end of the book, Saleem is much more mature and willing to face his future, like Eva was saying. He is very willing to accept the consequences of his life, and as he is supposed to represent a human form of India’s history, I wonder if this is a metaphor for India’s willingness to move forward.
    I also think the character development in this story is really interesting, as well as the characters Saleem chooses to include in the story. The Widow is a really interesting character because she seems to represent all evil that exists. She is described as “green and black”(503), and in a really sinister manner, as she is the end of pretty much everything to Saleem, which seems to be sending a political message that Indira Gandhi was the end for India. I really liked this book overall and really enjoyed learning about India’s history.

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  19. Wow! The fact that Maria Pareira switched the babies at birth was an insane plot twist. It’s something I never expected. I think it also adds another layer of depth to the character of Saleem. How odd it must be to know that the parents you have are your real parents. However, its also interesting that Saleem points out that “when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pareira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still there son: they remained my parents” (131). Its an astute observation about nature vs. nurture. Saleem was brought into the world by someone, but in his later life, it doesn’t actually matter who that someone was because those who raised him are the ones who made him what he was in the long run. However, its interesting how much emphasis our society puts on birth parents. Its an odd connection, but its clearly seen in the show Glee when Rachel finds her birth mother who she’s never had any contact with. They try to become friends and have that bond that all mothers and daughters have but then realize that they don’t know each other. They’ve had no common experiences and that its to late to form that bond, they can be friends, but they can’t have that mother daughter bond. I think thats the point Saleem is making: after a certain point, it doesn’t matter where you came from, eventually your parents are whoever raised you and shaped you to be the person you are.

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  20. “I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time” (142). I know this is a very short line in a very long book but I feel it deserves its own analysis for the reason that when I first read this sentence it pretty much blew my mind. It was plot..plot..plot..plot..woah profound life changing statement!..plot..plot..plot. This line is one that really digs deeper at some of Rushdie’s themes in this story in particular the theme of good and evil. He talks about it with the idea of good things and bad things happening in the chapter Snakes and Ladders (arguably my favorite chapter), and then comes at it again with this line. Its the idea that evil is always in this world and that its so ever present that one can’t possibly hope to face it 24 hours a day but it must be dealt with slowly but surely and that thats why we blink. Rushdie voices this idea that every blink is actually a millisecond of peace and respite from the constant deluge of bad things that happen every day. Also the fact that Baby Saleem doesn’t blink at first means that at first babies don’t realize the evil thats in the world and don’t know that they have to shut it out occasionally by blinking. He is taught to blink by the adults in his life, they show him that he has to shut out the world sometimes. This line just struck me as huge which is a terrible way to describe it but I’m not even sure why it was so moving. I do know though, that now I can’t look at a little baby staring at the world without thinking about this line.

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  21. Hello Rushdie Scholars!
    You have knocked my socks off with your thoughtful analysis of Rushdie's plot, narrative choices, and evolving metaphors. What I like best about this discussion is the way in which your ideas build on one another and you respond with deep reflection to each other's ideas and questions.
    Excellent reading & writing!

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