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The interplay between exile-in-narration and narrators-in-exile in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children, The Satanic Verses and The Moor's Last Sigh /

This thesis is an analysis of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses and The Moor's Last Sigh. The approach is twofold: (a) it seeks to establish an interplay between the concept of exile-in-narration (theme) and narrators-in-exile (form) as a reflection upon questions of rootlessness; and (b) it seeks to underscore this interplay as a recurring 'double bind' within each novel, such that the novels form a loosely bound trilogy that functions as a developing discourse on individual and national identity from a decentred perspective. The aim is similarly twofold: (a) it proposes that the metaphor of exile as a polarized state manifests itself as either an unreflecting pull of opposites or as a thoughtful acceptance of the inter-connectedness between ideas, people, places and things; and (b) it argues that once this polarization becomes evident, it disturbs all static narratives of selfhood and community to the point at which they can be reconceptualized, and yet remain open-ended.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.20458
Date January 1998
CreatorsPirbhai, Mariam.
ContributorsDorsinville, Max (advisor)
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageMaster of Arts (Department of English.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 001642682, proquestno: MQ43932, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

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