Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses

Abstract

In my thesis, I interpret this “quest for wholeness” (397) as Gibreel’s and Saladin’s attempts of finding their identities, and I argue that through the two men’s allegory of their identity search, the novel itself explores how the process of identification works in the postmodern and postcolonial world. In addition, while I examine relations between the protagonists and other characters, since according to Homi Bhabha “identification is a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness” (“The Third Space”, 211), I also examine certain spatial positions, symbols related to space, and certain motions in space, because these motifs seem to be unavoidable in a novel which main objective is self-definition, i.e. positioning itself or the characters in the world.