ThAct: Midnight's Children
Hello learners. I'm a student I'm waiting this blog as a part of thinking activity. This task is assign by Dilip sir Barad. So in which I have tried to some answer in interesting questions.
Midnight's Children
🔷 Video 1:
🔹 Learning outcome from the video :
This video focuses on the narrative techniques used in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
One key insight from the video is its emphasis on the novel’s innovative narrative design. Rushdie blends Western postmodern techniques with traditional Indian storytelling forms, producing a hybrid style that stands out in modern literature. Devices such as the familiar “lost and found” storyline and the “Chinese box” structure, where one tale opens into another, give the novel its unique rhythm and complexity.
To illustrate this further, the narrative is compared to a collection of “pickle jars.” Each jar symbolizes a mix of history, memory, myth, and imagination, reflecting the novel’s layered and fragmented structure. The use of the unreliable narrator, alongside elements of magical realism and social realism, adds another dimension to the story, constantly blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. This technique forces readers to engage critically with the text and its shifting realities.
Most importantly, the video highlights the inseparable link between form and theme in Midnight’s Children. The way the story is told is not just a stylistic experiment but a vital part of its meaning. The fragmented structure reflects the diverse, complex, and often contradictory experience of India’s history and identity. In this sense, the narrative form itself becomes part of the novel’s message, making the how of storytelling just as significant as the what.
🔷 Video 2:
🔹Learning outcome from the video :
1. Grasping Deconstruction in Literature
Learners should be able to explain Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, especially the notion of pharmakon (something that acts as both remedy and poison).
They should recognize how apparent opposites such as Saleem and Shiva, or memory and forgetting are unsettled and shown to overlap rather than remain fixed.
2. Interpreting Literary Symbols
Students should learn to identify important symbols in Midnight’s Children the perforated sheet, the silver spittoon, pickles, knees, and Saleem’s nose.
They should understand that symbols in the novel resist singular meaning: they may reveal while also hiding, heal while also harming.
3. Thinking Critically about Character Symbolism
Saleem and Shiva can be read as symbolic figures who embody tension and complementarity rivals but also mirror images.
Their symbolic weight can be related to philosophical dualities such as Yin–Yang or the double-sidedness of Janus.
4. Relating Objects to Thematic Concerns
Everyday things in the text jars of pickles, household objects take on metaphorical power, pointing to themes of memory, history, cultural shifts, and personal identity.
These objects highlight the paradoxical relation between preservation (keeping memory alive) and destruction (distorting or erasing it).
5. Postcolonial and Philosophical Dimensions
Reading the novel’s symbols opens a path to larger questions of postcolonial identity and the fragile nature of history.
Rushdie’s symbolic layering shows how personal stories and national history overlap, blur, and resist neat separation.
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