A Study On Midnight’s Children From The Perspective Of The Unnatural Narratology

Salman Rushdie,who has won the Man Booker Prize three times,is undoubtedly one of the greatest novelists in the English-speaking world today.For his Indian-British background,his works are mostly based on the backgrounds of his native India and the South Asian subcontinent.Through the descriptions of the personal experiences of the characters,he depicts the political turbulence,social upheaval,and religious conflicts that existed on the Indian subcontinent both before and after India and Pakistan were divided.As his representative,Midnight’s Children is more well-known,with a novel and unique subject.In the novel,Rushdie combines reality and fiction,novel and history,through a rich imagination,and presents readers with a physically and logically impossible world with Saleem Sinai,the protagonist with superpowers as the narrative subject.Therefore,based on the unnatural narratology,this thesis discusses the unnatural artistic representations in this novel—the unnatural narrator and its unnatural narrative acts,unnatural events,and unnatural time and space.Resorting to nine unnatural reading strategies proposed by Alber,this thesis analyzes the post-colonial position and critical consciousness expressed by the author based on his immigration status.It also emphasizes how the novel’s unnatural storytelling exposes and parodies India’s gloomy post-independence society.The research findings in this thesis are as follows:Saleem Sinai is both the protagonist and narrator of the novel.The telepathic superpower given to him by Rushdie in Midnight’s Children makes him a physically impossible narrator.Meanwhile,he tells the story from a “first-person omniscient” narrative perspective.This thesis discusses the unnatural narrative phenomenon of the narrator’s “omniscient” narration under the limitation of the “first-person” perspective.In addition,this study finds that the author describes Saleem’s life of “quest” for identity through the unreliable narrative acts of the narrator,revealing that Indians after independence are still in a mental state of displacement and identity crisis.The novel describes the physically impossible events that happen to “midnight’s children”with superpowers and Saleem’s encounters in the enchanted forest,the “Sundarbans”.At the same time,the author interprets the logically impossible unnatural events in the novel with the narrative technique of “denarration”,tampers with the real historical events and combines them with the novel events,and intentionally “lies” about the plot.Through the “falsity” of the narrator,the author conveys the long and profound history and cultural information of India and satirizes the chaos of Indian history at that time.This thesis discusses unnatural time and spaces together and finds that the narrator rejects the conventional linear narrative framework of “the past,present,and future” in the novel and adopts a nonlinear narrative structure to describe the accelerating life of Saleem,constructing unconventional multiple temporal modes,including retrogressive time lines and disordered discourse time.At the same time,this study analyzes the supernatural spaces in the novel and the transgressing spaces that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction.All of these anti-mimetic spaces in real life transcend the possibility of the real physical world and precisely add to the magic color of the novel.This thesis explores the unnatural narrative features in Midnight’s Children and the thoughts and emotions behind them,which not only helps readers to understand Rushdie’s narrative style and writing techniques but also allows us to interpret his narrative text from a new perspective and discover his extraordinary creation mystery.