SOURCE: Harrison, James. “Reconstructing Midnight's Children and Shame.” University of Toronto Quarterly 59, no. 3 (spring 1990): 399-412.

In the following essay, Harrison examines the structure, scope, and thematic unity of Midnight's Children and Shame.

In Midnight's Children and Shame Salman Rushdie has presented the world with certainly the most talked about and probably the most incisive treatments in English fiction of the Indian subcontinent since A Passage to India. He has also presented the academic world with what seem almost textbook examples of all that postmodernist criticism tells us should be found in any self-respecting contemporary novel.¹ And who am I to bite the hand that feeds me? Whatever needs illustrating, whether it be reader-response theory or metafiction or the tendency of language to deconstruct, Rushdie obliges. But these features alone cannot account for the widespread acceptance of his novels by a more general readership. And it does seem as...