How important is someone’s name? Coming from a person who has her name serially misspelled and mispronounced, a name is incredibly important. Names hold immense power. They hold the power to strike fear in the hearts of those who hear it and the power to foster hope and happiness within the listeners. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling, the villain strikes such fear in the hearts of the citizens that they refuse to give him a name. He goes by “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” in order to strip him of the power a name holds. The exact opposite happens with the hero of the series, Harry Potter. From the moment he defeats “You-Know-Who,” Harry’s name becomes a source of hope for the people of the story and his name becomes an
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He mixes traditional fairytale structures along with his own vivid imagination. Critic Andrew Teverson believes Haroun and the Sea of Stories falls under the “subgenre, suggested by Jean-Pierre Durix, ‘the children’s story which only adults can really understand,’” similarly to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) (Teverson 161). All three tales use nonsensical scenarios to obscure satirical intentions, and all three are organized around a central hero who travels to fantasy lands and return home to find that his or her previous struggles had been fixed. For example, after travelling to Kahani, Haroun returns home to find that his once unhappy city finally got their happy ending. This novel shows that all stories are inherently connected; they all spring from other cultures. Rushdie attempts to reinvent the genre by incorporating both European and English storytelling traditions on equal playing fields. He shows how both are interdependent and intertwined (Teverson 161). The author shows that all cultures have their own variations on traditional stories, “tales of different cultures are not separated from one another by rigid cultural divides and ‘walls of force’ but may share a number of significant features” (Teverson 162). For example, the “princess rescue story” is repeated throughout many different cultures and …show more content…
By combining multiple types of storytelling through allusion, Rushdie is able to have the same power as a name and reach people throughout many different cultures. Rushdie himself comes from a mix of different cultures, he lived in Great Britain, but was born in Mumbai, India and has very strong Indian roots. As a result of his cross-cultural upbringing Rushdie was placed into certain experiences that shaped the book through the paths of his characters. The ultimate significance of Haroun is the novel’s ability to combine different cultures to illustrate the importance of cherishing stories because without them the world is
He mixes traditional fairytale structures along with his own vivid imagination. Critic Andrew Teverson believes Haroun and the Sea of Stories falls under the “subgenre, suggested by Jean-Pierre Durix, ‘the children’s story which only adults can really understand,’” similarly to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) (Teverson 161). All three tales use nonsensical scenarios to obscure satirical intentions, and all three are organized around a central hero who travels to fantasy lands and return home to find that his or her previous struggles had been fixed. For example, after travelling to Kahani, Haroun returns home to find that his once unhappy city finally got their happy ending. This novel shows that all stories are inherently connected; they all spring from other cultures. Rushdie attempts to reinvent the genre by incorporating both European and English storytelling traditions on equal playing fields. He shows how both are interdependent and intertwined (Teverson 161). The author shows that all cultures have their own variations on traditional stories, “tales of different cultures are not separated from one another by rigid cultural divides and ‘walls of force’ but may share a number of significant features” (Teverson 162). For example, the “princess rescue story” is repeated throughout many different cultures and …show more content…
By combining multiple types of storytelling through allusion, Rushdie is able to have the same power as a name and reach people throughout many different cultures. Rushdie himself comes from a mix of different cultures, he lived in Great Britain, but was born in Mumbai, India and has very strong Indian roots. As a result of his cross-cultural upbringing Rushdie was placed into certain experiences that shaped the book through the paths of his characters. The ultimate significance of Haroun is the novel’s ability to combine different cultures to illustrate the importance of cherishing stories because without them the world is