Midnight's Children Stylistic Analysis

Salman Rushdie is one of the leading novelists of the twentieth century. He is known as one of the finest masters of English prose and both his fiction and non-fiction is noted for the intensity of the language. His writing style has been described as magic realism with a blend of fantasy, knife-sharp satire and many digressions in the plot. A major factor that dominates his work is the essence of India though he settled abroad for more than four decades, his knowledge and love for India has never been on a wane. In his novel, Midnight’s children, which he wrote in 1981 has been his booker prize winning novel. The appearance of Midnight 's Children ' in 1981 now stands out as a significant milestone. Midnight’s children

For Saleem, born at the very moment of India’s independence, his life becomes automatically interlinked with the political, national, and religious events of his time. This gives him a strong desire to restore his past identity to himself. Realism plays a big role here in terms of describing the significant events that have happened. It goes as detailed as Saleem himself and his family members, especially the experiences of his grandfather, provides a unique perspective for the readers to view what have happened during the period of Indian independence. Without the magic elements, Midnight’s Children could have been ended up as another historical documentary. Overall, the use of magic realism not only makes this novel more appealing, it also puts the readers to an another level of importance in terms of the narrator himself as well as the Indian history as a whole. Rushdie’s use of magic realism as a narrative technique is very apt as he portrays the postcolonial life in his novel. The Magic realism can therefore be seen as a device binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural