Historical Truth in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Question of Perspective

In the post-modern literary tradition, an absence of universal truth replaces prior notions of one absolute truth, in terms of history as well as such notions as identity and society. Just as postmodernism dismantles the concept of absolute truth, Linda Hutcheon’s concept of the “narcissistic narrative” exemplifies the postmodern undermining of prior traditions: “The origins of the self-reflecting structure that governs many modern novels might well lie in that parodic intent basic to the genre as it began in Don Quijote, an intent to unmask dead conventions by challenging, by mirroring” (18). Narcissistic narrative exhibits a narratorial awareness that invites the reader to participate in stripping prior conventions and traditions. Hutcheon argues that “What narcissistic narrative does do in flaunting, in baring its fictional and linguistic systems to the reader’s view, is to transform the process of making, of poiesis, into part of the shared pleasure of reading. [...] it is the human imaginative process that is explicitly called into action, in both the author and the reader” (20). Those novels that exhibit characteristics of narcissistic narrative emphasize the creative process and do so with an awareness of that process, breaking down old conventions and proposing replacements for those conventions. Salman Rushdie writes at the moment when new theories of history undermine recorded historical facts as the individual’s sole tie to history (as evinced by Collingwood, Foucault, and others). The need for a new way of looking at older historical forms makes Midnight’s Children a prime candidate for analysis in terms of narcissistic narrative, providing an example that explores new views of history. Ultimately, Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, exemplifies narcissistic narrative, inviting the reader to participate in creating and discovering an alternative to the typical historical traditions of historical truth as merely recorded facts: memory and the process of recalling memories produces individual histories that overlap some aspects of recorded history yet remain unique, individual versions of history.