Fictionality And Truth:A Historiographic Metafictional Reading Of Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie receives much critical attention from the contemporary British novelists,and his masterpiece Midnight's Children published in 1981 earned him the Booker Prize.Since its first publication,scholars have done extensive studies about the novel,and one of the themes they focus on is “history”.Although some critics have analyzed Rushdie's views of pickled history,they fail to elaborate Saleem's process of historiography and indicate the role of historical traces in historiography.This thesis analyzes Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children via the perspective of historiographic metafiction.It firstly analyzes Saleem's meaning-imposed process of such historical traces as “Baby-snap”,“The Boyhood of Raleigh” and “Newspapers”,and then explores other characters' interpretations of the above historical traces and the mnemonic failures of the historical traces,with an aim to state that the subjectivity of interpreters combined with the polysemy of historical traces give rise to the fictionality of historiography.Reconsidering the fictionality and truth of historiography not only promotes the collapse of grand narrative myth,but also provides us with apostmodern pluralizing rhetoric characterized by the multiple,the heterogeneous and the different to perceive the world,namely everything in the world has some values and we should perceive the richness of our life.