Private Lives and Public
Histories: The Ordinary, Memory, and Narrative
Responsibility in Midnight’s Children
Techi Takam
ABSTRACT
This paper examines Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children through the interrelated lenses of memory, ordinary life, and narrative responsibility, arguing that the novel reconfigures national history as an ethical and lived experience rather than a monumental or authoritative discourse. Moving away from grand historical spectacle, Rushdie foregrounds fragmented personal memories, domestic spaces, bodily routines, and everyday practices as crucial sites through which historical meaning is constructed and transmitted. Saleem Sinai’s unreliable and self-reflexive narration draws attention to the ethical burden of storytelling, where acts of remembering, forgetting, and revising become central to the representation of the nation. The novel demonstrates how private recollection is inseparable from public history, revealing history itself as provisional, contested, and deeply subjective. By privileging the ordinary over the spectacular, Midnight’s Children reimagines nationhood as an intimate, processual, and ethically complex formation sustained through memory, care, and the rhythms of everyday life.
