On the narrative technique of the work, I would suggest
that the role of Saleem as narrator is an important one because it is fraught with error
and bias. Saleem narrates the novels of both his own life and the life of the new
nations of India and Pakistan, leading up to and following Partition. The technique is
subjectively driven, seeking to create an objective feel. Yet, it is not objective, far
from it. The role of error and bias is a powerful one in the novel, as it drives home
the idea that totality is impossible. Subjective experiences that grow foggier with
time is all that is there:
Saleem Sinai is not an oracle; he's
only adopting a kind of oracular language. His story is not history, but it plays with
historical shapes. Ironically, the book's success - its Booker Prize, etc. - initially
distorted the way in which it was read. Many readers wanted it to be the history, even
the guidebook, which it was never meant to be; others resented it for its
incompleteness, pointing out, among other things, that I had failed to mention the
glories of Urdu poetry, of the plight of the Harijans, or untouchables, or what some
people think of as the new imperialism of the Hindi language in South India. These
variously disappointed readers were judging the book not as a novel, but as some sort of
inadequate reference book or
encyclopaedia.
The
technique of Saleem as being the only narrator, but being one that can be seen as
unreliable fits perfectly with Rushdie's focus in the novel. The issue of Partition and
history, in general, is fraught with inconsistencies, half- truths, half- lies, and
plain old gaps. Rushdie's narrator is much the same, but he is our guide, our only
guide, and we have to take what he says, how he narrates, as not dogma or absolute, but
rather the attempt to give us a feel of what that time must have been like. The role of
error is large in the narrative technique because it also empowers the author to make
the claim that anyone who professes to possess totalizing answers is acting in bad
faith. Notice when Saleem, a Muslim, boasts about his knowledge of Hindu Vedic texts,
and screws up a fact regarding Ganesh and the composition of, what Saleem says, is the
Ramayana. This is deliberate because it is a way of undercutting the narrator's own
sense of authority, and empowering us, the reader, to understand that history is, at
best, a collection of fuzzy impressions used to make something that once was whole,
partial and never to be in its original state. This bodes a great deal of similarity to
the post-Partition Indian Subcontinent.
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