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... Concordance would allow Saleem to bring meaning to moments in the "middest" by elucidating (or creating) their coherence with moments in the past and future. While Kermode talks about providing this order primarily through an "imaginatively predicted future" (8), Saleem approaches the project by ordering everything in his past into neat, causal relationships, with each event a result of what preceded it. While he is frequently skeptical of the true order of the past, he never doubts its eminence; he is certain that everyone is "handcuffed to history" (482). His belief in the preeminence of the past, though, is distinctly different than the reality of time for the Saleem who emerges through that part of the novel that Gerard Genette calls "the event that consists of someone recounting something" (26) (Saleem-now, we can call this figure). Saleem-now is motivated to act not by the past, but instead by the uncertainty and ambiguity of the future. ...
Saleem spends much of his energy in the story setting up neat causal relationships between events in his past to demonstrate his place "at the center of things" (272). ...
But while he might doubt his most overt reordering of the past, he is never skeptical of the pasts monolithic effect on its future. Saleem assembles the first book to demonstrate the breadth of his "inheritance" (119), and the heft of the book underscores the degree to which he believes that the past is "the cold waiting vains of the future" (7); to understand the activity of any moment, you need look no further than the past. ... That which Jean Paul Sartre says of Faulkners The Sound and the Fury is also true of Saleems story: "the past takes on a sort of super-reality" (267), for it is here that the answers to the present lay.
Approximate Word count = 1501
Approximate Pages = 6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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