Looking at it simply, Quichotte is a satire. Rushdie’s novel is like him: ambitious, smart – sometimes over-smart – critical and undoubtedly brilliant.

He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels and, yes, unforgivable things about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and ‘real’ realities, the death of the author, the end of the world.’ ‘He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He talks about his new project, which also happens to describe Rushdie’s latest endeavour: This character, called Sam DuChamp aka Brother, is the author of the book within the book that is Rushdie’s Quichotte. Like Cervantes, Rushdie too raises questions about authorship in his book – he pays homage to Cervantes, by inventing an author who is himself inspired by Cervantes. Everything – narrator, character, story, voice – comes down to the author – real, implied, or otherwise. Metafiction is an author-centred mode of writing. He implies that Don Quixote is a real historical figure, but also states later on in the story that Arabs are addicted to lying – so is Don Quixote a real or fictitious character? And if he is fictitious, who is his real author? In Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) – one of the earliest and most seminal examples of metafiction – the narrator explicitly tells the reader that the text of Don Quixote was originally written by an Arab historiographer, translated into Spanish by an anonymous Moor, and finally edited by Cervantes. The narrative voice often steps out of their narration to remind the reader that they are reading a book, and sometimes, may even don the role of a character and enter the story to prove a point. It draws attention to the fact that the story, characters, and sometimes the author themselves, may or may not be fictitious. Metafiction – literally, beyond-fiction – presents fiction as fiction it is a narrative of a narrative, a story within a story, that questions the nature, method, and presumptions of fiction, and thus of reality itself. Fiction is a narrative consisting of imaginary people, events, and descriptions presented as reality.

Quichotte salman rushdie