Midnight’s Children: Understanding the Dream of a Nation
Nelber Bonifacio

History and nation are the two main themes brought up by Salman Rushdie in the novel Midnight’s Children (1981). As the main character, Saleem Sinai, reflects extensively upon these themes, in the 80’ the novel was considered a post-colonial and a post-modern novel. In order to reflect upon these categorizations, I intend to explore the notion of history in which the novel takes place and the narrator’s claim of being materially part of history. I will use as references the works of Bhabha, Kortenaar, Anderson and Boehmer. The aim is to investigate how the narrator claims to represent the collective history of India through his own self and to explore the approaches on nationalism that is part of the narrative of the novel.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has been used as a representation of paradigm shift in post-colonial studies. According to Elleke Boehmer (189), the novel is the most iconic example of a post-independence narrative with capacity to establish new metaphors of nationhood. Not only with regards to rewriting history, but also to create and to frame defining symbols for the purposes of imagining the nation. The novel presents a change in the way that the narrative is created by means of tension between the form, style and the elements considered paradigmatic in order to discuss a literary work in the English language, whereas Indians are meant to be the national allegories.
In