Salman Rushdie, About movers: analysis.

The extract is part of a novel called Shame, written by Salman Rushdie in 1983. The principal theme of the novel is the Pakistani situation; in particular, it is focused on the people who ruled Pakistan. The extract is located in the central part of the novel and develops a specific point of the theme: the immigrant people’s situation. The reader can understand the core of the text already in the title that the textbook in which it is contained proposes. In fact, the noun mover means one that moves. The definition linked to the theme of the novel allows the reader to comprehend the theme of the extract.

The text is a prose, as the reader can see looking at the layout. It is divided into four paragraphs, each one has a different function:

-          The first introduces the argument and the narrator’s thesis. The thesis’ presence makes the reader understand the genre of the text he is going to analyse: it is an argumentative one;

-          The second one explains the reader what the thesis means and underlines its core;

-          The third one develops the concept of migration as anti-gravity action;

-          The last one highlights the identity of migrants as regards the narrator’s opinion.

The analysis of the single paragraphs permits to the reader to notice how the narrator develops the narrative structure.

As regards the first paragraph, the first sentence makes the reader notice the location of the extract in the novel. The adverb too highlights the bound of the text to the previous part of the novel: it is not the beginning of it and at the same time it is not its conclusion, otherwise it would have been a conclusive conjunction. The theme of the extract is explicated in the first sentence through the expression immigrant business. The second one introduces the narrators experience, bringing the argumentative text to a personal level; it is because of the speaking voice (the writer) experience that he had developed the thesis, as puts on the foreground the third sentence with the conjunction and. The thesis of the extract is the analogy between the emigration and the conquest of the force of gravity, that are both bounded to the flight.

The second paragraph explains the meaning of the thesis that is going to be favoured in the following one. Belonging is linked to gravity. Nobody knows the origins of gravity’s force and, in the same way, no one understand the origin of the human feeling bound to their homeland. Migration is the brake of this bound, and so the winning on the force of gravity. The last part of the paragraph is characterized by the narrator’s speaking directly to the reader and generalizing the previous consideration: roots, the moral and emotional bond we have with our home is also what allows us not to leave her, that does not allow us to take flight breaking the force of gravity. This is the personal opinion of the narrator, as underlines the expression I sometimes think, linked to that of the pervious one (I have a theory).

The third paragraph begins with the highlighting of the bound between the two terms of the thesis: the same name, flight. This is followed by the definition of migration and that of flight reinforcing the bound between the two. Migration is then associated to the anti-gravity, that is understood by the scientific and public opinion but it is not accepted as real and possible. If it will in the future be accepted there would be a production of anti-gravity pills that permit people to fly everywhere they want and so not to use airplanes. This production will consequently bring a change in the consideration of migrants: everybody that uses that pills will become a migrant and so the migrant condition and identity wold be accepted by the public opinion.

The last paragraph contains the explanation of the analogy developed in the entire extract. This one is the consideration that the narrator has as regards being a migrant. The detachment from family corresponds to the detachment of homeland (highlighted by the relationship with the gravity force), that is the detachment from memory, and so from history. History is time so the flight that bring human to separate himself by the family separates him also from time. The argumentative text analysed is so in opposition to them that consider migrants as traitors and highlights the positive aspects of being a migrant.