Narrative Anxiety in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

• Main Authors: Wang, Yung-Fu, 王詠馥
• Other Authors: Lee, Chia-Yi
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/rmfs3y

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 103 === Saleem Sinai, the protagonist as well as the narrator of Midnight’s Children, is trapped by an unusual condition; that is, writing is the only way for him to feel alive; whereas it simultaneously accelerates his journey heading to death. In this sense, this novel represents the tension between the eager of substantiating one’s existence and the necessity of resisting the threat of death. Curious about how Saleem copes with his anxiety resulted from such contradiction, I will anatomize the relationship between the act of writing and the construction of Saleem’s subjectivity to analyze the significance of anxiety. Taking Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology as the point of departure, in the first part the thesis I disclose the challenges Saleem has to face under the circumstance of relying on the language system as the medium to represent his memory. And later on I will use Jacques Derrida’s différance, in addition to the narrative errors Saleem deliberately creates in the novel, to uncover the positive connection between the signifier and the signified so as to prove that the act of writing indeed to do with the construction of subjectivity. Moreover, Saleem’s anxiety does not merely occur at the level of writing but also exists in the textual complexity. In the second part, we probe into Saleem’s confrontation with history and fantasy through the examination of his relationship with his alter-ego, Shiva, and his wife Parvati-the-witch respectively. Either physically or mentally, both of them challenge Saleem’s resolution of completing his narrative, revealing the hero’s predicament of reconstructing his subjectivity according to his will. Nevertheless, through the analysis of this thesis, the reader would find that, as the bearer caring the loss of existence, Saleem uses the imperfect to perfect the real human condition, demonstrating the quality of fluidity in the formation of subjectivity. Hence, the feeling of anxiety in Midnight’s Children, even if only functions expediently, indicates the vitality of our existence. We cannot stay away from the torture in the coming-into-being, apparently, but we can turn such affliction into the fuel of life, allowing it pushing us to move forward to achieve integrity.