Concepts of Heroism in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

Abstract

Constructing heroism is an intriguing function of the postmodernist novel. It images the power consciousness that defines the abrasive relations between the “centre” and the “periphery”. This has led to the ideologizing of its imaginastive construct to confront the supremacist ego of the master narrative. In effect, postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie try to vitiate the unitary hold of Western bourgois culture over the fictive paradigm, especially through its homogenizing mentality when, realistically speaking, heterogeneity-consciousness is the heart of inter-cultural harmony. To this end, Rushdie deploys heroic interdiscussivity to counter the conventionality of mono-heroic fiction. Inter-character relevance, therefore, dominates heroic appreciation in his idealistic spectrum. The present essay aims at revealing the extent of this postcolonial manipulation of characterization to revise conventional norms of heroism in the author’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The combination of the notions of asymmetry and symmetry in building character relationships, coupled with structuralist tenets, is used to conceptualize heroic eminence towards highlighting how heroism may sometimes transcend character prominence. Heroism is, at the end of the analysis, discovered to, in some cases, be a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly in the construction of characters, depending on the creative susceptibilities of a writer.