摘 要

《午夜之子》是英国文坛巨匠、印度裔移民作家萨尔曼·鲁西迪的成名作品。全书随着主角萨利姆的叙述展开，跟着他，我们仿佛亲身去到那个时代，经历了他跌宕起伏的壮阔一生。但叙事者的不断的插叙让全书故事发展蜿蜒曲折，阅读难以入门，这种十八弯式的叙事结构与古印度的两部伟大史诗一脉相承。许多学者和评论家都曾以多个角度对这部小说进行了分析。本文将从两大史诗中的框架式叙事结构出发，揭示这种结构的特点与妙处，再对《午夜之子》进行文本分析来展现鲁西迪是如何使用框架式叙事结构并达到其叙事目的。本文分为四个部分，第一部分介绍鲁西迪本人和《午夜之子》的情节梗概；第二部分先分析两大史诗中的框架式叙事结构特点再研究《午夜之子》中的叙事结构；第三部分分析了作者采用框架式叙事结构的原因和达成的目的；最后一部分对文章进行了总结并提出了笔者对本部小说的深层思考。通过框架式叙事结构，鲁西迪不仅使《午夜之子》读起来十分有趣，还成功构建出作者眼中的理想角色并将这本书推向了魔幻现实主义领域。

关键词：鲁西迪；《午夜之子》；叙事结构

Abstract

Midnight’s Children is a masterpiece of the British literary giant Salman Rushdie. As the book unfolds with the narrative of protagonist, Saleem, we are transported to that time, going through the ups and downs of his vast life. However, the narrator’s constant insertions make the whole story meandering and difficult to get started in reading. This winding narrative structure is in line with two Indian great epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. Many scholars and critics have analyzed this novel from multiple perspectives. This paper will start from the frame narrative structure in the two epics, revealing the characteristics and merits of this structure, and then conduct a textual analysis of Midnight’s Children to show how and for which narrative purposes Rushdie uses the frame narrative structure. This paper is divided into four parts. The first part provides the background knowledge about the author, the plot summary of Midnight’s Children and a literature review; the second part first analyzes the characteristics of the frame narrative structure in the two Indian epics and then studies this structure in Midnight’s Children; the third part explains the reason and the fruits of adopting this structure; the Conclusion part reviews the entire paper and contains the further thinking of Rushdie’s writing purpose of this book. Through the frame narrative structure, Rushdie not only makes Midnight’s Children fun to read, but also succeeds in constructing the author’s ideal characters and pushing the book into the realm of magic realism.

Key Words: Rushdie; Midnight’s Children; Narrative Structure

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Introduction to Salman Rushdie and Midnight’s Children 1

1.1.1 The author and his works 1

1.1.2 Plot summary of Midnight’s Children 2

1.2 Literature Review 3

1.3 Structure of the paper 4

2 The Frame Narrative Structure in Midnight’s Children 5

2.1 Frame narrative structure in Indian epics 5

2.1.1 Mahabharata 5

2.1.2 Ramayana 6

2.2 Frame narrative structure in Midnight’s Children 7

2.2.1 Characterization 8

2.2.2 Supplementation 10

2.2.3 Intervention 11

3 The Reason and the Fruits of Adopting this Structure 13

3.1 The reason of adopting this structure 13

3.2 The fruits of adopting this structure 14

3.2.1 The attraction to readers 14

3.2.2 The magical realism 14

3.2.3 The divinity of Saleem 16

4 Conclusion and Limitations 18

4.1 Conclusion 18

4.2 Limitations 18

References 20

Acknowledgements 22

A Study on the Frame Narrative Structure in Midnight’s Children

1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction to Salman Rushdie and Midnight’s Children

1.1.1 The author and his works

Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He is regarded as one of “The Three Outstanding Immigrant Writers in the British Literary World”, and the other two are Kazuo Ishiguro and V. S. Naipaul. Rushdie has won the Booker Prize, the U.K.’s highest literary award, three times. In June 2007, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his outstanding literary achievements.

Rushdie was born on 19 June 1947 in Bombay and his family is a middle-class Kashmiri Muslim family. His father, who graduated from Cambridge, was a lawyer-turned-businessman and his mother was a teacher. He was sent to study in the U.K. when he was only 14 and then moved to Karachi, Pakistan with his family. When he was 18, he came back to the U.K. to study at King’s College, Cambridge, majoring in history. He was deeply influenced by the hippie culture, the antiwar and civil rights movements of the mid-1960s during his college life. Rushdie felt the racial prejudice that was deeply rooted in people’s minds when he lived in the U.K., and his life in Pakistan led him to reflect on the religion: all these experiences influenced his writing a lot.

Rushdie published his first work, Grimus, in 1975. Then, his second novel, Midnight’s Children, catapulted him to literary notability, winning the Booker Prize three times. What made him more famous was his fourth work, The Satanic Verses. After it was published, many Muslims accused the book of desecrating Muhammad. On 14 February 1989, a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death was issued by Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran. Then Rushdie asked for the protection of the British police. Although Iran issued a compromise statement in 1998 and Rushdie stopped hiding, the death sentence by Iran has not been rescinded till now.

Despite being persecuted since the 1990s, Rushdie never stopped writing. To date, Rushdie has published 13 novels, 4 essay collections, 2 dramas, 2 anthologies, and 1 screenplay. And almost every fiction of him is set on the Indian subcontinent. “He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations” (Wikiwand, 2020, p.1).

1.1.2 Plot summary of Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children is set in India, where Rushdie was born, and it mostly depicts the life of the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, who was involved in many historical events after the independence of India. Saleem himself narrates all the stories to his wife, Padma, in the book and it is divided into three books.

Book One begins with the birth of Saleem. Then it goes back to 1915 when Saleem’s grandfather, Adam Aziz, returned to his hometown, Kashmiri, to become a doctor after studying in Germany. During the process of seeing the patient, Naseem, through “the perforated sheet”, Adam fell in love with Naseem and they married. Their daughter, Amina, married a businessman, Ahmed Sinai, and moved to Delhi. Later, because of the anti-Muslim movement in Delhi, they went to Mumbai and started doing business on real property. They were then joined by a son, Saleem, who was born at a very special time, just at 00:00, on August 15, 1947, the time when Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, proclaimed that India became an autonomous nation. Because of the special time of his birth, Nehru sent a congratulatory letter to bless this child who was born and grew up with independent India. Until then, Saleem’s life was tied to the country.

Book Two details Saleem’s childhood. On August 15, 1947, between the hours of 00:00 and 01:00, 1001 children were born in India, of whom 581 survived. These children, who were born around the same time as their country, were “midnight’s children”. Because they were born in a historical moment, they all were imbued with special power. The closer the time of birth was to 00:00, the greater the power would be. Some children could change their shape, some were able to do time-travel, etc. Saleem and another child, Shiva, Saleem’s nemesis, were the most powerful children. Saleem was able to enter the minds of others to see what they were thinking. Shiva’s power was “war” which gave him a strong body and a great power in fertilizing. A decade later, Saleem used his power to establish a mental connection with other “midnight’s children”. They would hold a meeting every day at midnight and set up an organization called the MCC^[1]. However, Saleem’s life was not always smooth, an incident occurred when Saleem was 11 years old. His nanny, Mary, confessed that Saleem was not their parents’ own child, and another “midnight child” Shiva was. They had been deliberately switched by Mary at birth. Ahmed was infuriated and Amina took Saleem to Pakistan. Later, when the Sino-Indian War broke out and Ahmed suffered a heart attack, the two returned to Mumbai and the family reconciled. Saleem had a giant nose like his grandfather but it was a never-ending running nose, so his father took him to do nose surgery, which resulted in the loss of his original power, but he acquired a new one, knowing others’ emotions through sniffing. This power turned Saleem as a “military dog” in the Bangladesh Liberation War in later chapters. In January 1963, Saleem’s family moved to Pakistan, and the family split during the war.