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How would you characterize the narrative mode of Midnight's Children?

Salman Rushdie’s seminal Man Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children is written as a first-person memoir from the perspective of Saleem Sinai, a man born at the exact moment that India became independent of British imperial rule. Rushdie upsets the conventions of typical memoirs by presenting readers with a distinctly unreliable narrator and incorporating elements of magical realism throughout Midnight’s Children. Indeed, Saleem acknowledges his way of incorporating details into his narrative:



“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail... everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across” (14-15).



Rushdie uses Saleem’s inconsistent narrative style to disorient readers who are accustomed to trusting narrators. Saleem is unable to provide a wholly trustworthy account of his own life, let alone the historical events that inform his Indian heritage.


Thus, Rushdie writes Midnight’s Children through a first-person perspective, but includes unusual elements such as an unreliable narrator and elements of magical realism in an effort to have readers question the validity of the text.

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