Jason - Rushdie - 2/16

Based on Saleem’s narrative, it seems to be irrelevant whether what he says actually happened in the reality of the story or even in the reality that the story is superimposed upon. On page 87, Saleem states, “‘What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.’ True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden in the stories…True was a thing concealed just over the horizon…” What I take this to mean is: despite the factual accuracy of a given event there is an underlying meaning to that event which can then be manipulated into another form, another kind of “factual event,” so that it appears to be presented differently, though the meaning remains basically the same. This little passage seems more or less to be a discussion of magical realism and its power to take the latent meaning of something and presenting it in some other way. An example of this follows immediately after the passage above in which Saleem says that, based upon this criteria for the truth, his mother really did know about him six months before his birth (presumably referring to the events at Ramram’s prophecy-giving ritual) and that his father really did come up against a demon king (here presumably referring to Ahmed’s encounter with the Ravana Organization). In both instances one fact is replaced with another, but because the meaning or intent of the meaning is the same, the factual descriptions of these events are in a way interchangeable. In these terms, the question as to whether Saleem is a reliable narrator who “tells the truth” is still applicable. The truth that Saleem tells is a subjective truth, though because many facts are presented in a “magical” light they may seem to be beyond the scope of subjective observation. These magical details/facts are perhaps an even more subjective version of the truth since the facts presented to the reader are based upon the frame of reference of the narrator (Saleem) who’s presumably the source of the novel’s seemingly distorted and exaggerated picture of reality.