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es thefirst-person narrator Saleem as a fictional strategy to connect with the history of India by weavingpersonal history and public historical stories and even myth into this novel.Timothy Brennanexpresses his ideas on the construction of his third-world national identity,demonstrates howRushdie’s Indian story and his national building are related,and believes that Rushdie is a truly“third-world cosmopolitan[4].”

2 Unnatural Narrator and Its Unnatural Acts ofNarration in Midnight’s Children

2.1 Unnatural Narrator:Saleem·Sinai

To clearly define the“narrator”,Richardson also further distinguishes between the conceptsof“author”and“implied author”.In his opinion,“the author is the person who writes(or taps thekeyboard)and keeps royalties in the bank;the implied author is the image or emotion we imaginethe author as,based mainly on our reading of the work;and the narrator is the fictional person(people)who conveys the narrative[51]109.”Of course,the narrator elaborated here is based onmimetic narrative,in which the composition of the narrator is usually human or human-like beings,and its narrative function can only be within the human scope.However,according to Jan Abler,anunnatural narrator cannot exist in the real world since their representation is embodied in physical,logical,or human impossibility[57].Unnatural narrative works usually choose to let the impossiblenarrator tell the story to confuse the reader’s perception[62].

Rushdie tells the story of Midnight’s Children through the mouth of the narrator,Saleem Sinai, and expounds his ideas about politics,culture,religion,history,and education.As the narrator ofthe novel,Saleem Sinai tells a legendary story of its own and its mysterious and complexentanglement with the Indian subcontinent through an autobiographical first-person narrative—anunnatural“first-person”omniscient and“telepathic”narrative with the supernatural ability ofmind-reading.In the text of the novel,the narrator shows us the local customs,politicalcircumstances,and religious ethics of the magical Indian subcontinent through his own story andhis family history in an omniscient way.

2.2 Unnatural Acts of Narration:Identity Quest in UnreliableNarrative

Acts of narration are the narrating behaviors acted out by the narrator.Therefore,research onnarrative acts should be concentrated on the role of the narrator.Accordingly,unnatural acts ofnarration can be regarded as“physically,logically,mnemonically,or psychologically impossiblenarratives,”in the views of Jan Alber[57]113,which makes the literary works presented speciallyand creatively.Brian Richardson defines unnatural acts of narration as“extreme narration,”ofwhich he explains several categories,including“first-person plural narration,”“second-personnarration,”“multi-person narration,”“unreliable narrator,”and“extreme narrator[55].”Additionally,Brian Richardson’s explanations of the unnaturalness of several“acts of narration”can be regarded as an analysis of the“unnatural narrator”at the level of the narrator’s behaviors[55].Based on Richardson’s classification,the narrative behaviors acted out by the“unreliablenarrator”in Midnight’s Children are unnatural.In the novel,the unnaturalness of the narrator’sacts of narration is presented by the unreliable narrator in the identity quest of the narrator,SaleemSinai,which greatly enhances the unique charm of the novel.

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