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Satire
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Midnight's Children is set in the Indian subcontinent, principally during the lead-up to independence and partition that occurred in the first half of the 20th century. In accordance with the magical realism genre, certain places and settings take on a fantastical quality, representing the overwrought drama of the past in memory. In retrospect, the places a person once lived and spaces they once occupied can become symbolic (of youthful innocence, trauma, religious revelation, and so on). Saleem accords such symbolic meaning to many different settings over the course of the narrative.
Early on in the novel, Aadam Aziz's hometown in Kashmir takes on the symbolic quality of a memory, representing tradition and innocence. The courtly, mythical nature of Aadam Aziz's early relationship with Naseem aids in this. Their tale unfolds as a romance between knight and princess might: her, sequestered in a stately house by her father, the landowner; him, a successful man tasked with a quest to cure her ailments. Innocence and tradition fall by the wayside when the two leave Kashmir for British-occupied India. Naseem is introduced to modern, Westernized expectations of women, which she grates against. Aadam, who up until leaving Kashmir had been fairly removed from the more violent aspects of colonialism, finds a rude awakening when he sees people being shot in the streets. If British-occupied India represents modernized and Westernized values, Kashmir diametrically opposes that setting.
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