关键词: 后现代; 自恋叙事; 自我意识; 记忆; 历史观; 《午夜之子》; 鲁西迪

Abstract: Just as postmodernism dismantles the concept of absolute truth, Linda Hutcheon’s concept of the “narcissistic narrative” exemplifies the postmodern undermining of prior traditions. The need for a new way of looking at older historical forms makes Midnight’s Children a prime candidate for analysis in terms of narcissistic narrative, providing an example that explores new views of history. Based on three aspects of narcissistic narrative: the self-aware narratorial style, the reader participation invited by the text, and the new rules of literature invoked with the employment of narcissistic narrative, this paper intends to interpret the historical writing in Midnight’s Children through analyzing the subversion of traditional view of history, narrative form and form of truth carried out by the novel. Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, exemplifies narcissistic narrative, inviting the reader to participate in creating and discovering an alternative to the typical historical traditions of historical truth as merely recorded facts：memory and the process of recalling memories produces individual histories that overlap some aspects of recorded history yet remain unique, individual versions of history. This paper demonstrates that Rushdie undermines the conventional ideas of history and posits a multiple versions of history that are comprised of a chutnified mixture of individual memory and recorded fact, which is a typical post-modern philosophy of history.

Keywords: postmodern; narcissistic narrative; self-consciousness; memory; history; Midnight’s Children; Salman Rushdie