What is the theme of Salman Rushdie's "In the South"?

Salman Rushdie’s short story “In the South” documents an elderly man called V. Senior on the last day of his best friend V. Junior’s life. In less that 15 pages, Rushdie grapples with the meaning of life, the nature of death, and the passage of time as V. Senior processes the loss of his friend.,who, in retrospect, he considers his shadow. One theme that overarches Rushdie’s discussion of these broad concepts is the idea that life and death are senseless. Although it is part of human nature to develop a schema that makes sense of our lives, there is no set of choices or beliefs that will protects us from unhappiness, heartbreak, and ultimately death.

This theme can be seen in Junior’s reflection on the golden shower tree outside the men’s apartment complex:

“It has stopped growing now," Junior said, approvingly, "having understood that eternity is better than progress. In the eye of God, time is eternal. This even animals and trees can comprehend. Only men have the illusion that time moves.”

Again, we encounter the same theme: humans lack the understanding of events outside of their control. Rushdie explains that men have tried to give this tree many names, but ultimately they have no control over its growth or what that growth represents. The tree's existence represents the passage of time.

Rushdie addresses life’s senseless course at the end of the story. He details a tsunami that sweeps the south of India. He writes that

Senior did not like the Japanese word everyone used to name the waters of death. To him the waves were Death itself and needed no other name. Death had come to his city, had come a-harvesting and had taken Junior and many strangers away. In the aftermath of the waves, there grew up all around him, like a forest, the noises and actions that inevitably follow on calamity—the good behavior of the kind, the bad behavior of the desperate and the powerful, the surging aimless crowds.

Rushdie describes death and its aftermath as “inevitable.” He uses personification to give Death a sense of strength and intentionality. In the face of such a formidable and all-powerful Death, the categories that compose our identities and worldviews seem small and insignificant.

As nihilistic as this viewpoint may seem, Rushdie seems to find a certain beauty in life’s inexorable march into oblivion. Throughout the story, characters make unexpected connections between youth and senility and between life and death. The smell of talcum powder, for instance, reminds one character that “babydom is not only our past, but our future too.” It seems that Rushdie does not see death as a full stop, a big bang, or a “last little puff of vapor” when our souls leave our bodies. Rather, death is connected to life in ways that are simple and complex, material and abstract. He sums up this view by explaining this in terms of the story’s two main characters and their favorite place to bicker. He writes that

Death and life were just adjacent verandas. Senior stood on one of them as he always had, and on the other, continuing their tradition of many years, was Junior, his shadow, his namesake, arguing.

What are the theme and plot of "In the South" by Salman Rushdie?

Salman Rushdie's "In The South" is a fictional short story that was published in the May 18th, 2009 edition of The New Yorker. The setting is the southern Indian city of Chennai in late 2004, between Christmas and New Year’s.

The plot centers around two eight-one-year-old Indian men—Senior and Junior—who share a deep friendship but also thoroughly enjoy bickering with each other. They share a lot of similarities and a lot of differences between them. Their conversations are almost reminiscent of an old married couple.

Senior has a wife with a wooden leg who he patently can't stand, a large extended family, and an enviable social circle. He yearns for the sort of stimulating conversations that he used to have with old friends, all of whom have died off.

Junior (who is seventeen days younger than Senior) is unmarried, has little family, and is by all accounts a mediocre man. His life has been more isolated and solitary, yet his outlook is more positive.

They live next door to each other and emerge each day on their balconies at the same time to engage in their conversation. Through their dialogue, we see how they are at once so close and yet so opposite.

Rushdie uses these two distinct character types to explore the dichotomy between opposing forces in life, such as youth and age; individuality and community; success and defeat; excellency and averageness; and most notably, life and death, which Senior and Junior opine on with lightness until such theme becomes all too real at the end.

The story, too, is ultimately a treatise on friendship and how nearing the end of one's life, with all the culmination of one's life experiences, can have a profound effect on how it manifests itself.

Who are the characters and how are they characterized in Salman Rushdie's "In the South"?

The two main characters in the story are called Senior and Junior, two old men who share a name that starts with V but go by their nicknames because they dislike their given name so much. They are the same age, eighty-one, though Senior is older than Junior by seventeen days. They live in apartments adjacent to one another and frequently go out to their balconies to talk, or more often argue, with one another. They bicker and quarrel, insulting each other, but it is all part of their relationship; they also walk together, once a week, to cash their pension checks. Both Senior and Junior are both directly and indirectly characterized: this means, respectively, that the narrator sometimes uses adjectives to describe them directly and, at other times, tells us about their attitudes and behaviors and allows us to come to conclusions about their natures and relationship ourselves.

Junior is a static character, which means that he does not undergo any significant or fundamental changes in the story. Senior is a bit more difficult to pin down because he is certainly affected by Junior's death. I would say that he is dynamic; in the end, he thinks, "The world was meaningless. There was no meaning to be found in it, he thought. The texts were empty and his eyes were blind." He has not always felt this way, but now he thinks that "Death and life were just adjacent verandas." He was never the most optimistic or lively fellow, but now he feels that his life has lost meaning, that the world has lost meaning, and this was not the case before.

What is the narrative point of view in Salman Rushdie's "In the South"?

Salman Rushdie's short story "In the South" is told from a third-person omniscient point of view. The narrator is impersonal but knows the thoughts and feelings of Senior and Junior, the story's main characters. The narrator informs the reader of things that the main characters would probably not disclose, such as their health problems and private grievances. Such knowledge is a hallmark of the third-person omniscient perspective.

Even though the narration occasionally strays to give us insight into other characters, such as Senior's peg-legged wife or the girls on the Vespa, it confines itself mostly to the perspectives of Junior and Senior. This provides these two characters with a large degree of depth. However, the point of view also describes elements of the setting apart from the characters' limited scope, giving the story a more vivid context.

This point of view also includes lessons that the characters themselves fail to grasp. Although the world around them is lively and full of energy, Junior and Senior are constantly concerned with death. The narrator shows them in a faced-paced, lively world in which they move about slowly. From the very opening lines of the story, the liveliness of the world is painted in bold colors. The characters physically live within this world but emotionally exist outside of it. A first-person perspective may not have been able to achieve this juxtaposition. Rushdie's choice, a less personal third-person point of view, is able to do so.