Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Ants, Again.
I'm pretty sure we blogged about this in like August or September as it related to the Tin Drum and 100 Years of Solitude, but ants reappeared in Midnight's Children, as a symbol of death and decay. We see ants when Saleem encounters his friends dead and on the brink of death. We also see ants in the the general who dies under the loudspeakers. Before this year, I always saw ants as the prime example of working together against the greater odds (probably because of that Pixar movie, A Bug's Life), but now I totally see ants as a symbol of decay in literature.
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4 comments:
I feel like everybody wants to be Dali... Yeah it's weird that ants appear so often in modern literature. I never would have thought to connect ants with decay before this year also. The way Rushdie used ants seemed pretty similar to the way ants were used in 100 Years of Solitude and in that surreal Dali movie with the girl and the razor/eye (with ants eating people.) I feel like ants don't just reappear, they reappear eating people. I don't really know what to think about that.
I don't see how ants are a symbol of decay. A raven makes sense for death, but not really ants. I guess they just decided it was a good image and all went along with it. And also, the only ants I hear of killing people are from Africa
I think that ants can represent working together and decay. It mostly just depends on the context of the novel or story. Ants work together to build their anthouses but they also reoresent decay buy eating our leftover food. The ants in this story definitly represent decay and I think it is very interesting that they also represnt people
The ants were very important especially in the scene with the church bell. Rushie related humans to the real ants and it became confusing to decide if he was talking about the ant-like "people" or the ants themselves.
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