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Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Rushdie's writing style in Midnight's Children contains a variety of literary ideosyncrasies that upend convention. Postmodernist novels like Midnight's Children will often deliberately defy stylistic convention in an attempt to explore why those conventions exist in the first place. This may include experimenting with linguistic standards (e.g., writing in dialect instead of in Standard English), time, and narration, among other things.
In Midnight's Children, Rushdie experiments heavily with time as a dimension of narrative. The story does not progress entirely chronologically but in fits and starts, jumping back and forth between various moments in the past and present. One gets the impression that the narrator, Saleem Sinai, is a kind of time traveler with omniscient knowledge of the past, present, and future. As such, Saleem will often allude to future events before they happen. Rushdie uses ellipses to denote these shifts in time and space, signaling to the reader Saleem's foreknowledge of events even as their precipitating circumstances take place.
Rushdie plays with form as well as style, utilizing filmic language throughout the novel to describe the imagery of a scene and how events unfold. At times, Midnight's Children is even written how a film might be edited, with quick "cuts" alternating between different "scenes," depicting multiple conversations occurring at once.
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