An Analysis Of Magic Realism In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie is a famous British Indian novelist and essayist. Midnight's Children is generally regarded as his best novel, which won the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize at the same year of its publication and was later awarded the'Booker of Bookers'Prize in 1993 as the best novel to be awarded the Booker Prize. Midnight's Children is also the only Indian novel on Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels since its founding in 1923.The writer of the present thesis believes that the reason why Midnight's Children achieves such extraordinary success and attracts so many readers all over the world lies in Rushdie's unique artistic style of blending magic realism, which is rooted in Latin American literature and absorbs the essence of the western modern literary schools and the creative thought, style and theoretical foundation of the precedent magic realistic writers such as Cervantes, Sterne, Milan Kundera and García Márquez, with the traditional culture of the Indian subcontinent rooted in his native soil. Through the employment of magic realism, Rushdie deepens the novel's subject of reflecting the reality and causes impressive magic and aesthetic effects in the readers'mind by blurring the boundary between the past and the present, the dead and the living, the fancy and the reality. Midnight's Children has become one of the representative magic realistic works. However, the research into the magic realistic features is in a very small amount both at home and abroad, and their focuses are on the purpose of Rushdie's using magic realism, i.e. he uses it to express his migrant identity and particular postcolonial position of"neither the one nor the other", his opposition to both western discourse hegemony and radical decolonization theory. This thesis is an analysis of the magic realism in it and comes to the conclusion that by alluding to the gods and mythic stories in Hinduism, Rushdie suggests the way to solve the crisis of modern India, i.e., to revive the traditional culture of India and learn from it. This thesis is composed of five chapters.In the first chapter, the author introduces the writer Salman Rushdie, his masterpiece Midnight's Children and its theme, and then puts forward the aim and significance of the thesis.In the second chapter, the author gives a brief account of the critical response of Midnight's Children both abroad and at home.Chapter three is an exposition on magic realism adopted in the thesis: its elements and origin, the main principles and characteristics, and the representative writers.Chapter four shows the artistic embodiment of magic realism in Midnight's Children through a detailed analysis of it. The characters in the book are veiled in mystery and magic through the magic characterization; magic realism is also manifested in the universally adopted symbolism such as various colors and the appearance of ghosts; and the narrative methods are helpful to create a magic atmosphere in the book and further reveal the potential truth, especially the juxtaposition of the past and the present, Indian oral narrative, the ambiguous narrative, the prophetic plotting, fragmentary narrative structure, and subjective narrative.Chapter five comes to the conclusion that by using magic realism, Rushdie achieves a magical atmosphere through which he reveals his concern about the fate of India after independence and the pessimistic view of India's growing up from its special and gifted youth to a hopeless and drained adulthood. Knowing the fact that the western culture cannot save India from trouble, the author resorts to the traditional Indian culture to realize the revival of India.