Re-Vision of History: Historiographic Metafiction in Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract

Rather than simply accept the "official" historical record, historiographic metafiction reexamines these records and events in showing different perspectives. This creates a dialogue between the text of the novel and the original texts of history, forcing the reader to examine more closely the texts being presented in both the "official" record and the novel. Two novels that operate along these lines are Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (1962), the supposed memoirs of an American who becomes a Nazi officer in Germany during World War II; and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), a novel examining the interwoven histories of the narrator's family and events in the history of India, including independence from Great Britain and the Emergency period under Indira Gandhi. These texts experiment with history by examining how those histories are constructed as memoirs by their character authors as well as what they mean and communicate to their contemporary audiences. By examining the methods by which histories are created and what they communicate to their audiences, Mother Night and Midnight's Children speak directly to the levels of meaning and construction in the histories chosen for re-vision.