The Power of the Story: Analyzing Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life

• Main Authors: Wei, Chung-Yi, 魏崇益
• Other Authors: 藍劍虹
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9waqy2

碩士 === 國立臺東大學 === 進修部兒文所碩士班(台北夜間) === 106 === This thesis aims to analyze two Salman Rushdie’s novellas for children: Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life from a perspective of story as the language experience. Analyzing the narrative mixed with fairy tales or video game, the setting of magic adventure, the effects to the child protagonists, exploring the plot interwoven with fiction and real in term of intertextuality and Rushdie’s intent to convey are involved. This study is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is the introduction. Chapter Two explores the writing backgrounds, story synopsis, the styles of the two novellas, and the connection between the storyteller’s life crisis and the adventurous trials of the protagonists. Chapter Three discusses the use of the unreal stories, the setting of fantasy world Kahani, the fictiveness of language and the existence of the stories for human beings in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Rushdie’s use of this story to response to the fatwa. Chapter Four discusses the storyteller’s story library and video game narratives in the magical world of the protagonist on the trial process in Luka and the Fire of Life, and analyzes the magic of the language, how the story is transmitted and transformed and co-prospered with humanity, and how the story shows the power of the story in fiction. Chapter Five reviews the subjects of the novellas by two acrostics written by Rushdie for his sons, Zafar and Milan. In the conclusion, it is illustrated the crisis of humanity and literature symbolized with the crisis of the storyteller, and that Rushdie thinks about the particularity of the stories to humans by these two novellas, and that the stories summon truth in the fiction, reminding people to keep the rationality in the influence of the stories, and pointing out the importance of imagination.