The condescending descendent : an attitude revealed through the historiographic metafiction of Salman Rushdie’s ‘midnight’s children’

Abstract

In my essay, I argue that the project of preservation in Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' is undermined by the very process used to achieve these outcomes and in the process, reveals that their focus on history is a condescending façade to hide part of a path to preserve themselves and not the community or the multiplicity of history, yet this condescension is one that is paradoxically necessary and liberating. In arguing for the condescending descendent, this essay is divided into three chapters. The first, “The False Dominance of the Condescending Elite’ focuses on and elaborates on the way the attitude of superiority can be seen between the elites and the subaltern. The second chapter “The Generation Gap” focuses on how this same attitude exists in a space more personal than between classes; that is, between generations within a family. Lastly, is the chapter on “The Contradictory Nature of the Condescending Descendent” which focuses on how the self-important descendent may not necessarily be a negative character.