Point of View

Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh is written in the first person, like an onion slowly peeled. Only at the end is it revealed that he has written down the lurid details during an imprisonment by a former family friend, and that, by doing so, he extended his life. Clearly, however, he also feels a profound need to confess the darkest secrets of his tormented family. It is a cautionary tale that the world at large needs to hear. The narrator, Moor, assures the reader that he works from memories shared by his mother as he posed for paintings and by his father, who wished to make a clean breast of his evil deeds before he died. He carefully lays out hypotheses and facts, and qualifies the telling each time new evidence comes to light.

The choppy way in which the plot advances is explained by...