The Post-Colonial Memory Writing And Community Reconstruction In Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie(1947-)is an Indian-born British writer and an influential writer in post-colonial literature.His masterpiece Midnight’s Children(1981)has won the Booker Prize three times and is considered the best work among all his award-winning works.The novel tells the story of three generations of a family,and connects the family and the country,thus showing the appearance of India in the post-colonial era and the Indian people’s confusion of the identity construction,which is very characteristic of post-colonial literature.The characters’ identity construction in the novel is inseparable from their memory.This thesis uses Jan Assmann’s theory of memory writing and Ferdinand T?nnies’ s community theory to explore the different stages of memory the characters confronted with in Midnight Children.They experience the rupture of memory,the seek for memory,and the narration of memory so as to construct their Indian community in the post-colonial period.This thesis mainly consists of three parts.The first part mainly introduces Rushdie’s life and works,a review of domestic and foreign research on the novel,and Assmann’s memory theory and T?nnies’ s community theory.The second part is the main part of this article,including three chapters.The first chapter mainly analyzes that the characters cannot gain identity due to their memory loss,which leads to the breakup of the community.The younger generation established the Congress in order to rebuild India,but the lack of memory led to the disintegration of the Congress,marking the disintegration of the political community;the Indians who had experienced the colonial period refused to remember,so their misplaced identity led to the collapse of the spiritual community.The second chapter discusses the characters intend to find out the causes of the community breakup through looking for memory.First,the memories of two generations of the Sinai family show that the locality in Indian community is deconstructed as a result of British invasion of their mother-land.Then,through the oral colonial memory,the secret of Saleem’s birth is revealed,showing the split of the blood community.Finally,the historical memory in the objects is displayed.The juxtaposition of colonial paintings and Indian native artifacts shows the confusion of the spiritual community caused by the mixture of British and Indian cultures.The third chapter discusses that Saleem reshaped the community to a certain extent by telling his memory and constructing his own post-colonial identity.Firstly,he tells the memory to connect the present with the past and recognizes his own Anglo-Indian identity,and at the same time he forms a mixed-race family to rebuild the community by blood;secondly,he sets the legacy of memory by storing memory,and obtains a diachronic continuation beyond the limitations of time and space,thus he enables the younger generation of Indians to construct their own national identity and reconstruct the sense of identity of the post-colonial identity,which forms the community of mind.This thesis elaborates the idea that Midnight’s Children incorporates personal memories into collective memories through memory writing,and communicative memories are transformed into cultural memories.It redefines individual identity,reinforces the sense of national identity of the Indian people in the post-colonial period,and reshapes the community through social interaction and cultural inheritance.