Salman Rushdie: The Oral Narrative

In an interview in 1985, Rushdie talks about the techniques he used in Midnight's Children as his attempt to reproduce the traditional techniques of the Indian oral narrative tradition:

"Listening to this man (a famous story teller in Baroda) reminded me of the shape of the oral narrative. It's not linear. An oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the middle to the end of the story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or in loops, it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then takes you off again, sometimes summarises itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the story teller appears just to have thought of, then it comes back to the main thrust of the narrative...

"So that's what Midnight's Children was, I think, and I think everything about Laurence Sterne, Garcia Marquez, and all that, comes a long way behind that, and that was the thing that I felt when writing it that I was trying to do."