Use Of Postmodern Outlook Of Memory In Midnight's Children

The Postmodern Outlook of Memory in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Winterson’s Written on the Body and Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending

Narration involves the action of retrieving memory the vast majority of times and we all are storytellers sometime in the course of our lives. Not all of us are professional novelists, but we are sure to have been found narrating a story or some of our life events to other individuals. If you think of it, we are constantly in a flow of narratives, and to a good extent such common accounts originate from our memory. Studying how an author tackles memory in a novel can provide us with valuable clues about how memory actually works in all of us. We are aware of the fact that memory is discerning and unstable,

In Errata, Rushdie states that “…one of the simplest truths about any set of memories is that many of them will be false.” To what extent are we reliable? How do we actually bring back our memories into narratives? The reading list of this course, which includes Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, includes the same type of narrator - a first person narrator - which makes us believe that these narrators might be unreliable to a certain extent. Given narratives tend to be so strongly biased, we have no choice but to believe so; even the narrators themselves comment on their own unreliability. They are well aware of it, and sometimes they even narrate unreliably on purpose, as it occurs in the case of Salem Sinai, who is the narrator of Midnight’s

All narrators are aware of their own unreliability and have no setbacks in showing it openly. The use of this type of narrators is not only common in contemporary literature; there have been many other instances of unreliable narrators throughout the history of literature. For instance, one could mention the unreliability and misinterpretation of Nelly and Lockwood in Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, or Nick’s judgments in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). It is quite clear then that this kind of narrator cannot be fully trusted, even if we might believe that we are in full control of our experiences in life; the things which we have witnessed, and as usually put by individuals “the things we have lived”, may be considered to be blurry. Memory is not perfect; Sigmund Freud thoroughly examined this issue in the 19th century, perhaps suggesting a theory about how the damage we suffer can blur our memories. In The Sense of an Ending, Tony speculates “You might even ask me to apply my ‘theory’ to myself and explain what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I’m not sure I could answer this, to be honest” (Barnes