Blurring the Boundary between History and Fictionin Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

Abstract

The Satanic Verses is a post modern fiction about the condition of migrant people, struggling to protect their existence in foreign-land because the history and religious rigidity does not allow them to cope on the situation and turn it in to religion burden.By fictionalizing the history of Islamic world through the dream vision of protagonist and of fallible narrator, novel deliberately decontextualizes the origin of religious discourse.By inserting the imagination to the historical records, Rushdie fictionalized single holy treatise into plural versions. Salman Rushdie uses historiographic meta fiction as a narrative tool to focuses on fictional formation of historical records so that the politics behind every human artifact could appear. By exposing how history hides its fiction and highlights its fact to meet their subjective goal, this research study comes to the conclusion that so-called transcendental holy writ is only mere construction of human imagination. The novel explores the human divided self in multicultural milieu that does not rely on their own cultural root. Therefore, historical episode is suspected and triggered the human imagination in place of religious submission. The novel mixes fiction and history so that it fits to the present post modernist context.