International Journal of English Literature and Culture
 

International Journal of English Literature and Culture

Vol. 6(3), pp. 50-63, June, 2018

 ISSN: 2360-7831

DOI: 10.14662/IJELC2018.031

Review paper

“O Ireland my first and only love / Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove?” (48) – These are the lines, Sadik-J-Al-Azm quotes from an early poem of Joyce to express Salman Rushdie’s position in the literary world. This is more so, as Rushdie employs ‘pessoptimistic divide’ (Ball 110) in his novels to embrace the polarities of post-colonial and postmodern era and celebrate them, without denying or transcending them. He uses it as an artistic method to construct it as the theme, the form and the mode of narration in his novels. This paper aims to analyse this artistic method through microcosmic deconstruction of the first four chapters of Midnight’s Children under the limelight of the concepts expounded by deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and Hillis Miller and also modern theologians and existentialists like Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich and Jean Paul Sartre. Sentences like 'the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement' (MC 3) to describe Saleem’s birth and emergence of India as an independent country, that point towards intricate fissure of Hope and Despair, are taken for scrutiny to study the nature of the ‘pessoptimistic’ tone (Ball 110), their significations and the third spheres that pop up from the interplays of Hope and Despair.

Keywords: ‘pessoptimistic divide’; ‘absolute faith’, ‘courage of despair’; ‘creative despair’;    ‘free play’; ‘strange opposition’; ‘intimate kinship’ ‘hymeneal bonding’; and ‘osmotic mixing’.

Cite This Article As: Vidya V (2018). Construction of the Theme, the Form and the Mode of Narration through ‘Pessoptimistic Divide’: A Deconstruction of First Four Chapters of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Inter. J. Eng. Lit. Cult. 6(3): 50-63

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