On The Unnatural Narrative Time And Space Of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie is an Indian-British writer,who is known as the godfather of post-colonial literature.Set in India and the South Asian sub-continent,most of his works represent the political turmoil,social changes,and religious disputes in the Indian subcontinent before and after the Partition of India by describing the personal experiences of the characters.In Midnight's Children,with the protagonist Saleem Sinai as the narrator,a boy endowed with magical power,Rushdie combines the reality with fiction and presents an unstable world that is full of unnatural elements.Therefore,on the basis of unnatural narrative theory,this paper analyzes the novel Midnight's Children from the perspectives of unnatural narrative time and space and adopts the unnatural interpreting strategies that Jan Alber proposes to analyze the book,thus conveying Rushdie's critique of colonization and imperialization on the basis of his immigrant status.This thesis is divided into five parts.The first part introduces Salman Rushdie and Midnight's Children and briefly describes the research purpose and significance of this thesis.The second part is literature review,which systematically reviews the current research of Rushdie and Midnight's Children at home and abroad and puts forward the innovation of this paper.The third part explains the unnatural narrative theory and introduces the temporal and spatial features of unnatural narrative.The fourth chapter makes an examination of unnatural temporal and spatial phenomena in Midnight's Children and employs two unnatural reading strategies to analyze the unnatural narrative time and space in the novel.The conclusion part summarizes the content of this thesis and indicates that this book exposes and criticizes the dark society of India after its independence.By analyzing the novel,this thesis finds that Rushdie rejects the traditional linear narrative structure of past,present,and future and creates the unnatural narrative time and space both in story and discourse by adopting unnatural elements,unnatural narrative structure,and unnatural narrator,thus realizing his critique of the dark India before and after Independence.In addition,by using unnatural narrative theory to Midnight's Children,this paper enables readers to achieve a better understanding of Rushdie's narrative style and writing techniques and provides the reference for the study of other postmodern novels represented by Rushdie's Midnight 's Children.