Saleem Sinai – Number one of the 1001 Midnight’s Children. The display of inner and outer dimensions of understanding and not understanding within one of Salman Rushdie’s most read books [Full text]
Alina Petra Marinescu [1]
| Abstract: Written as a statement against the tremble that wry modernization has brought to the Indian people’s lives, Salman Rushdie’s novel, “Midnight Children” (1981), depicts the inner conflicts and the outside-bounded fight of the man struggling to stick to his primary identity in times of political, economic and cultural re-identification. In order to psychically and physically outlive his times, Saleem Sinai is obliged to cope with his own process of cognitive dissonance and to deal with his lack of understanding by means of myths and fictional representations up to creating a parallel existence. Being part of a family that overcame the people’s general poverty, Saleem is born at the exact moment when India gains its Independence. Finding out that he is one of the 1001said-to-be-gifted midnight children, the boy identifies with his country’s fight and tries to understand all the events by transposing them into his own history. Keywords: India, Independence, identity, modernization, family |
[1] Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, Romania, petra.marinescu@gmail.com