Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Multiple Personality is Why the Narrator, in Regard to Gandhi’s Death, is Unnecessarily Unreliable

In his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of his “best of the Booker” novel, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie explains the principles of its magic realism: “I have written…elsewhere about my debt to…Dickens for his…ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyperrealistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seem to grow organically…” (1, p. xi).

To repeat: “…almost hyperrealistic background…”

The mentality that wrote the introduction believes that the magical elements of the story should have a very realistic background.

So it is startlingly inconsistent when Saleem Sinai, the first-person narrator, says, “The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But…in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times…Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge…” (1, pp. 189-190).

Thus, the mentality behind the introduction is not the same mentality that is behind the first-person narration. Had the former been in charge of writing this novel, the date of Gandhi’s death would have been, at the very least, corrected in a re-write, because the background should be very realistic, and there is no literary necessity, in plotting or characterization, to get the date of Gandhi’s death wrong.

I have written in past posts that the unreliable narrator is suggestive of multiple personality. My argument is even stronger when the narrator is unnecessarily unreliable, and is in clear violation of the author’s own principles.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children [1981]. New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.