Theme: Nationalism & Identity
Political and Historical Cataclysm in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
M.Vanisree
Associate Professor,
Department of English,
S.V Engineering College for Women,
Tirupati.
E-mail: vanisrinivas14@rediffmail.com Salman Rushdie is a multinational writer. He belongs to different cultures. Both his legacy is somewhat disputed and the same replicate in his novels i.e., existential dilemmas of the individual. Rushdie’s characters create angst in the psyche of the readers. His works create tension and evoke conflicting emotions in the readers. His assertions on secularism and religion are even more ambivalent. Rushdie’s Mid Night’s Children has an intellectual and intercultural richness. This novel ‘Midnight’s
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He is also acutely aware of how fantastic and far-fetched his narrative sounds to the skeptical, pragmatic Padma. After he emerges from his fever-induced dream, it becomes especially important for Saleem to assert the veracity of his story. Saleem encounters Shiva and came to know that he is the biological son of Ahmed and Amina Sinai who had to beat the brunt of this unjust world for the doing of Mary Pereira. Shiva had become the leader of a notorious gang in the Bombay’s underworld. He did not accept the leadership of Saleem as he too was born on the stroke of midnight. He wanted the joint leadership of the conference by the virtue of his birth. This started a rivalry between Shiva and Saleem, which was going to have far reaching consequences both in their lives as well as in the life of the nation. Shiva became a representative for the force of the evil, which posed a threat to the notions of liberal freedom represented by Saleem. Shiva was used by the ruling Congress party to rig the elections of 1957 in Bombay which resulted in Kasim Khan’s defeat but the Communist Party emerged as the single largest opposition party in the
World War II, the second war Hitler was vanquished in but different battles. WWII Hitler decided to kill off all Jewish people, he wanted to wipe out their whole existence. But from all of this destruction came forth a man who was to tell their story, a boy who lost everything to a man who wanted Jewish people dead. Elie Wiesel, was the boy that was there from the start of this war against genocide. Elie have consequently written the book “Night” which tells his tale of the war moreover his survival.
In the memoir Night , Ellie Wiesel describes his horrific experiences as a young 15 year old Jewish boy during the Holocaust under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitter. At the young age of thirteen, Ellie and his family were transported to numerous ghettos and concentration camps in which he witnessed and experienced the worst type of inhuman cruelty and torture ever Recorded. During Wiesel's time at Auschwitz it affected him physically ,mentally and spiritually, which he records in his memoir. While Ellie demonstrates weakness, he also displays moments of perseverance under the extreme circumstances of prosecution under the Nazi regime. Many lives were permanently altered by the Holocaust, impacting individuals physically, mentally, and spiritually
“In that instant I feel the thinness of his arms.” Rodriguez states this about his father and the current state that he is in. This is the first encounter and time Rodriguez and his father exchanged words that night. The reader can infer that his father is still upset about him being fluent in English. Rodriguez also notices the state his father is in and that he is getting old and that his mother looks very sad.
The Holocaust is a destruction on a massive scale, it was significant part of today’s history because it teaches people how and where genocide can take place in. Although, the violence was targeted towards the Jewish people, non-Jewish people were also killed during this traumatizing event of world history. The memoir Night by Eliezer Wiesel tells the story about Elie’s Holocaust experiences. In his story, Elie experiences and encounters several relationships involving himself and other characters. The theme relationships are essential for physical and psychological survival are shown throughout the book when situations involving Mrs. Schächter, Stein, and Elie occur.
The Monster That Came Out at NIght Most parents tell their children that monsters come out at night. What do monsters usually do during the night? They kill or bring death with them.
In the second half of the novel, “Moonlight Shadow”, the theme of death and loneliness continues. For example, Satsuki jogged to the river where she and Hitoshi hung out, when she meets a woman named Urara. Urara tells Satsuki to come back to the river on a certain day because she will have “a vision...something that happens only once every hundred years or so.” On the appointed day, Satsuki returned to the river and witnessed an unbelievable vision: “There was HItoshi. Across the river, if this wasn’t a dream, and I wasn’t crazy, the figure facing me was Hitoshi.
In Chapter 9-14 Holden Caulfield leaves Penecy Prep and heads to New York City. Where he will stay for a couple days before winter vacation starts and he will head home. Delaying breaking the news to his family he got kicked out of school for as long as possible. These chapters are where Holden’s loneliness becomes abundantly clear. The reader is subjected to many long rants by Holden about the company he wants, though he attempts to settle several times.
In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, he displayes a theme of desperation and confusion. It tells the story of the Jewish race from the point of view of a teenage boy. Their family then gets split, so the sister and the mother go to one concentration camp and the brother and the dad go to another. When they arrive to the camp, they get split into different sleeping quarters. Throughout the rest of their journey, they experience hardship and torture as in having to be “Pressed tightly against one another, in effort to resist the cold,” (Wiesel 98).
To find a man who has not experienced suffering is impossible; to have man without hardship is equally unfeasible. Such trials are a part of life and assert that one is alive by shaping one’s character. In the autobiographical memoir Night by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, this molding is depicted through Elie’s transformation concerning his identity, faith, and perspective. As a young boy, Elie and his fellow neighbors of Sighet, Romania were sent to Auschwitz, a macabre concentration camp with the sole motive of torturing and killing Jews like himself. There, Elie experiences unimaginable suffering, and upon liberation a year later, leaves as a transformed person.
Night Prompt #2 Many know of the victims of the Holocaust and how fragile they were, but not many know how the few that survived did so. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who was only fourteen when he arrived at Auschwitz, he talks about his life alongside his father who was the only family member he did not get separated from in the concentration camp. Eliezer explains how he overcomes the horrors he witnessed in order to survive and be freed.
Mahfouz, as well as Said, shared a direct contact with the Arabian lifestyle because they grow up in that society. Mahfouz’s novel depicts the real world with the touches of the supernatural and mystic, but as a form of evil in the world not as exotic and uncivilized as the Europeans did. Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days “takes new depths and insights as it picks up from where the ancient story ends” (Fayez 229). Mahfouz uses the Arabian Nights tales and Shahryar’s and Scheherazade’s society to portray the contemporary social and political issues of his people. Mahfouz aims to show various thematic concerns of the people of the East than the early versions left out.
“Night” is a poem by Hilda Doolittle better known as H.D. Born in Pennsylvania on September 10, 1998. The work of H.D was “characterized by the intense strength of her image economy of language and use of classical mythology”. Mythology is the myths of a group of people depending on each culture. While classical is a long established event or idea or also traditional, HD used traditional myths to create each poem. She was also the leader of the imagist movement which was very important at that time.
Mohsin Hamid has grounded his resistance narrative in the identity narrative and through the prism of identity offers a deep insight into the American society and its ideals. The novel exposes the ugly side of the American society with its fundamentalist institutions and dislodges the narratives of fundamentalism as a Muslim monopoly and inverts the myths and discourses on identity to produce a counter narrative. Key words: Identity, Fundamentalism, Culture, Stereotyping, Resistance. Identity as it has unfolded in diaspora writings has changed our perception about this seminal issue that has for times immemorial been a central focus of academic circles across the world.
The novel, The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, describes the life of some people from the Lost Generation in post-World War I Europe, but mostly in Paris, France and Pamplona, Spain. This novel rotates around Jacob, or Jake, Barnes’, the narrator’s, life; which mostly includes drinking with his friends, Robert Cohn, a Jewish man who is often verbally abused by his “friends”, Ashley Brett, an attractive woman who Jake is in love with, Bill Gorton, a good friend of Jake’s, and a couple others. Their life in dull Paris seems to revolve around spending money and drinking, but when they go to colorful Pamplona, Spain, they have an amazing time during the fun-filled fiesta. Ernest Hemingway uses the “iceberg theory” when he presents Jake Barnes to the reader; he does not directly tell you a lot about Jake, but through Jake’s thoughts and emotions, one can tell that he was injured in the war, he is not a very religious person, he would rather do what he loves, instead of what he must, and he does not like to be honest with himself, despite the fact that he is one of the more honest characters in the novel. Ernest Hemingway does not directly let the reader know that Jake is injured in a special place; he allows the reader to interpret that from Jake’s thoughts and memories.