Write a critical close-reading of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories with specific focus on the novel’s use of fantasy to communicate the underlying issue of censorship. You don’t have to discuss the entire novel. Select a few sections that directly address this topic and offer an original interpretation. Reflect on the connections between the stylistic and formal choices of the author and the subject matter of the novel. Consider how cohesively the novel works as a historically informed text on colonialism, censorship, speech, narrative and the idea of resistance. A close-reading is more than a mere summary: it involves reading between the lines, teasing out the relationship between form and content and revealing the dynamics of makes a text effective.
