Salman Rushdie's In The South

“In the South” written by Salman Rushdie, is a short story about two very normal and similar old men living two normal and similar lives. Senior and Junior had very different backgrounds growing up, yet they somehow ended up in the same place together during their old age. Their lives together were very ordinary, but one day all that changes when the younger of the two men, Junior, falls and dies. The story illustrates the possibility of chance through irony as well as multiple foreshadowing and flashback events leading to the climax of Junior’s death. Chance has the ability to create unity through similarities, and to destroy unity through differences. It is ironic that with the two vastly different outlooks on life between Senior and Junior, …show more content…
Junior’s life, however, “had been a disappointment to him, … yet he was not an unhappy man” with where his life had taken him (Rushdie). These two comparisons become ironic when the man who wanted to die, lives on; and the man who loved life, dies. Senior had everything going for him: he has excelled as a “college-champion long-distance runner;” he had worked for the public safety while maintaining railroads; he had “a group of ten friends;” “he had married a kind women;” and he had a total of “two hundred and four family members” through his marriage and his siblings’ marriages (Rushdie). However, it was by “a curse” that his generation had ultimately deceased, including his lovely wife, and all of his friends. Therefore, to Senior, “love began to annoy him” since he lost all of the love he once cherished (Rushdie). This is why Senior hated life so much in his old age; since he had so much in …show more content…
These men would have normally never had any sort of relationship with each other in their younger days, yet they ended up as next door neighbors sharing the same name. Although “they fought” all the time, they still somehow became very close friends in their ordinary life. Then, chance happened. Both of the old men were “waiting to cross the road,” going to the same place to cash the same checks (Rushdie). However, there was a Vespa that “wobbled too close to where Junior stood” that caused him to jump backwards and lose his balance, therefore falling and ending his life (Rushdie). It was by chance that the girl driving the Vespa failed to keep herself straight in the road, or that the Vespa didn’t wobble closer to Senior, or wobbled somewhere far from either one of them. By coincidence, Junior was “complaining of a weakness in his ankles” on the very day he needed the support of his ankles the most (Rushdie). If the Vespa had wobbled next to Senior instead, it is possible that he would have recovered because his “kidneys or [his] liver will fail long before [his] ankle does” (Rushdie). Events could have happened in so many different ways on that day, but chance dictated the final outcome. It was chance that destroyed the close “invisible” bond between Senior and Junior through Junior’s