Saleem, the "swallower of life," the text's all-pervasive postcolonial narrator, cautions us that "Midnight's children can be used to signify many things." In the aforementioned statement, the term "midnight's children" relates to both the offspring of midnight that Salim is referring to and the author's deliberate concern with the text itself. In this novel, Rushdie creates a heady concoction of history and narrative technique to bring to the table a plethora of issues concerning the postcolonial identity of Indians born after partition. He does this by drawing on the postmodern tradition of "disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, and self-reflexivity." The author builds an India in the text that resonates by undermining the conservative understanding of post-British India and simultaneously making fun of the idealistic fantasies of perfect freedom.