Midnight’s Children: Genre 1 key example

Using elements of fantasy and mysticism in Midnight's Children, Rushdie presents the events leading up to and following Indian independence as a kind of mythos. Through this mythos, Rushdie explores the role of storytelling in intergenerational remembrance and resistance. Take, for example, the following passage from Book 1, Section 3—Hit-the-Spittoon, describing the assassins who murder The Hummingbird:

And know this: suddenly one of the killers’ eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!

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The Hummingbird, a leader in the fight against the Partition of India, is murdered by a man whose glass eyes crack and break on the carpet. The assassin is quite literally unable to see—with easily breakable eyes—representing his inability to see The Hummingbird's vision of peace and unity. Magical realism removes the need to express the assassin's misaligned values explicitly or through metaphor. In the world of the novel, supporters of the Partition physically lose sight of The Hummingbird and simultaneously "lose sight" of a peaceful solution.

Midnight's Children is also a postmodernist, postcolonial novel. Both of these genres aim to deconstruct: in postmodernism, this entails the deconstruction of narrative, which Rushdie accomplishes through the use of meta-narrative techniques (e.g., having the narrator constantly draw readers’ attention to the construction of the narrative, “pulling back the curtain” so to speak). Postcolonial narratives attempt to undermine the various exploitative institutions and rhetoric created to uphold imperial empires, which Rushdie does through his portrayal of how the British Empire treats its Indian colonial subjects.