Comparing Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories

Salman Rushdie is anything but ordinary. His style of writing is as explained, “He is not a realistic writer; he is the foremost practitioner in England of magic realism.” (1) He has a way of creating characters and plots that tell a story in a different way than normal authors. Similarly, In Toni Morrison’s speech, she uses a story of a blind woman to express the idea of the life and death of language. So, what’s the use/threat of stories that aren’t even true? Well in Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Rushdie and Toni Morrison speech, the stories are a way to expose the author’s true intentions by encouraging the use of imagination and creativity. A story that tells a life lesson or an underlying message that could be said in a simple straightforward

Sengupta. She expressed her frustrations and eventually says “You are only interested in pleasure, but a proper man would know that life is a serious business. Your brain is full of make believe, so there is no room in it for facts.” (Rushdie, 22) This shows that there are people who believe that fictional stories do not serve an important purpose. However, the land that Rushdie creates exposes the power of storytelling and with each story character Haroun meets, it teaches him value. For example, on page 63 Rushdie says, “To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it-well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being.” Here the water genie tries to tell Haroun that there is a reason as to why magical things are happening to him. It also shows how Rushdie uses creative writing to give stories meaning to objects that at first had no meaning. This book demonstrates that by giving it meaning sheds a different insight that readers often neglect because everything is viewed in a straight