Fictions to Live in: Narration as an Argument for Fiction in Salman Rushdie's Novels

Joel Kuortti's Fictions to Live In is a study of Rushdie's six novels to date: Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and The Moor's Last Sigh. By analysing each of these individual texts, the present work aims at an evaluation of the status of fiction in these novels. It illustrates how one of the major implications of Rushdie's works is the argument for the centrality of fiction in human societies; that there is, in a way, an argument for fiction as an epistemology and, finally, an ethics. An argument for an ethics which seems to bring forth a third possibility, that which is both-and.