This article examines the implications of history in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), and Colum McCann’s Transatlantic (2013). History plays an important role in discriminating and distinguishing the proper characteristics of certain nations and people of a specific historical era. The purpose of the current paper is to scrutinize the historical components in the selected novels. These novels incarnate the authors’ visions of the silenced minorities depicted in the fictional plots. They embody the sense of individual sufferings at the time of human devastation and retardation caused by historical events. In essence, my study focuses on the authors’ abstract voices which are uttered through
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In ancient civilizations, the use of parchment or other writing devices gives us a picture of how human beings reacted to history. Then, history came into another phase. The ancient eras were concerned with the abstract, or virtual, meaning of history. They did not take the material aspect of history as the proper documentation of their lives. History became material i.e., historical documentation switched on to be recorded in advanced chronicles, libraries, periodicals, lecture and so forth (Leech …show more content…
Rushdie opens the story by describing the setting. Rushdie sets the novel on a demarcation line between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He directs the narrative on three sisters who rear up a son named Omar Khayyam. They teach him confidence and instruct him not to succumb to shame, the synonymous word ‘sharam’ in Arabic language. Because of this teaching, Omar becomes interested in women sexually, and he leads a debauchery life, especially in his relations with women. Rushdie puts conflict into the events when another fictional character is suspicious of Omar and his desire to live in debauchery. Yet, the notion of debauchery is close to the theme of shame in the novel, for it is seen in another character. One of the fictional characters, who is twin to another, takes on the shame of the world and becomes a ‘Beast’ symbol. Omar gets married to her, and later this marriage paves the way for his death. By the end of Shame, Sufiya, Omar’s wife, kills him. She decapitates him
In ancient civilizations, the use of parchment or other writing devices gives us a picture of how human beings reacted to history. Then, history came into another phase. The ancient eras were concerned with the abstract, or virtual, meaning of history. They did not take the material aspect of history as the proper documentation of their lives. History became material i.e., historical documentation switched on to be recorded in advanced chronicles, libraries, periodicals, lecture and so forth (Leech …show more content…
Rushdie opens the story by describing the setting. Rushdie sets the novel on a demarcation line between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He directs the narrative on three sisters who rear up a son named Omar Khayyam. They teach him confidence and instruct him not to succumb to shame, the synonymous word ‘sharam’ in Arabic language. Because of this teaching, Omar becomes interested in women sexually, and he leads a debauchery life, especially in his relations with women. Rushdie puts conflict into the events when another fictional character is suspicious of Omar and his desire to live in debauchery. Yet, the notion of debauchery is close to the theme of shame in the novel, for it is seen in another character. One of the fictional characters, who is twin to another, takes on the shame of the world and becomes a ‘Beast’ symbol. Omar gets married to her, and later this marriage paves the way for his death. By the end of Shame, Sufiya, Omar’s wife, kills him. She decapitates him