Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (post #3): Neither Plot-Driven Nor Character-Driven, it is an Autobiography of Alternate Personalities

There is neither a plot with a climax nor a character who grows. The story ends when the protagonist and his alternate identities are worn out and used up: At the end, Saleem Sinai is “only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have been so-many too-many persons…Yes, they will trample me underfoot…just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son…and a thousand and one [midnight’s] children have died…” (1, p. 533).

So why is this considered one of the best novels of the 20th century? It is a humorous, magical tale of amazing complexity. Readers can’t imagine how a writer could come up with a story like this. And the only way that a writer could come up with a story like this is if it were not constructed or made up, but reflected the author’s inner world of multiple identities. As suggested by the author’s comments quoted in a previous post, the characters were largely autonomous and told their stories.

As to whether Saleem’s voices and telepathy indicated psychotic schizophrenia or nonpsychotic multiple personality, the latter proved to be the case. Saleem’s ability to hear the voices of, and communicate with, his midnight’s children (alternate identities) waxed and waned for psychologically understandable reasons—such as whether he was in India or Pakistan, and whether or not the alters felt they could trust Saleem—which is what you would expect in a nonpsychotic, psychological condition like multiple personality. And although Saleem's family did have him hospitalized at one point, they evidently came to accept his thinking as creative rather than psychotic.

The episode when he gets total amnesia for who he is after a head injury, while it could have been neurological, could also have been the kind of amnesia sometimes seen in people with multiple personality, as discussed in a past post about the real-life amnesic episode of Agatha Christie.

The fact that Saleem meets one of the midnight’s children—Parvati-the-witch—does not mean that she was not an alternate identity. In multiple personality or “double” stories, it is a common literary convention to incarnate the alternate identity as if it were a real, separate person.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator comments: “The process of revision should be constant and endless; don’t think I’m satisfied with what I’ve done! [However, he really can’t revise it, since] It happened that way because that’s how it happened” (1, p. 530). That is, since he wasn’t creating or imagining the story in any ordinary sense, but was getting the story from the lives of his alternate identities, their lives were what they were, take it or leave it.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children. New York, Random House, 1981/2006.