Literary Elements Posts

In general, in Midnight's Children, Rushdie uses a lot of imagery and foreshadowing. He uses a lot of imagery to help enhance the stories in the novel, especially the setting. The imagery also really adds a lot to his writing and I enjoy the story a lot more because he uses imagery so often. The foreshadowing he also uses helps us understand what's coming next because his plot really does skip around a lot with time periods and different people. Therefore when he tells us, as readers, what's coming next it really helps me sort out the storyline a little better in my head. I also found an example of a metaphor that I really liked in the book, I had to go back a bit to find it, but I had remembered reading about it and I thought it was cool and described the situation in India very well. In this quote the author compares the optimism of the people in India to a disease, "It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism...He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was to be brought under control....It was indeed a resilient virus--the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding" (pg. 38). I really liked this metaphor because I thought it described the revolution in India in a really interesting way. The optimism and idea to break free from Britain is like a disease in that it spreads from person to person until many Indians have caught the disease, or in other words the idea that they can pull off a revolution and get rid of the British. Then there are the authorities that take drastic steps the get rid of the "disease" of optimism by killing all those that have it so it can't spread anymore. However the "disease" of optimism is so strong that people keep contracting it and in the end the disease wins, because we know that the revolution in India succeeds. I really liked this metaphor and there are more good ones like this in the novel that I really enjoy reading because they so much add to the novel and make it more interesting to read.