Structure

Rushdie’s Languages of Truth is organized into four parts, each of which contains a series of titled essays. In the essays from Part One, “Wonder Tales,” “Proteus,” “Heraclitus,” and “Another Writer’s Beginnings,” Rushdie establishes his interest in exploring story and the literary arts as historical sustenance for the human spirit. By placing “Wonder Tales,” and its three companion essays that follow, at the forefront of the collection, the author introduces his overarching belief that stories “contain profound truth” about human nature, experience, and identity (6). In the essays from Part Two, the author expounds upon and complicates this notion by considering a network of distinct artists and artistic works. He particularly focuses on the writings of Roth, Vonnegut, Beckett, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Andersen in order to explore the ways in which novels and works of fiction perpetually expose the multivalent and metamorphic nature of being alive...