English 101

Poetic justice is the concept that people are punished commensurate with their actions. Choose two characters from Rushdie’s “The Phophet’s Hair” and identify their faults and punishment. Were the characters punished with poetic justice? Offer specific evidence from the tale to support your claims. Be sure to quote, cite, and reference from the text(s) using appropriate APA format. Your post must be at least 300 words.

Poetic Justice

 ANSWER

Poetic Justice is a dramatic style of punishing the characters for their vicious acts in a novel. This paper identifies Rushdie’s The Prophet’s Hair in highlighting his use of poetic justice to punish his malicious characters.

The story portrays Hashim, a wealthy moneylender, as hypocritically self-satisfied. His two spoiled westernized children further manifest a lack of self-satisfaction ‘gassy contentment of that household’ (Rushdie, 2016). These characters are punished for their selfish acts. Hashim, a selfish money lender, lands himself into possessing the Prophet Mohammed’s artifact while floating on water. The relic appeared to have been stolen and therefore cursed by the Prophet, and whoever owns must be punished by it. As a result of Hashim’s possession of the relic, the traditions reinstates the possession with a disastrous vengeance on his family. They were filled with less contentment, his children Atta and Huma plots to get the relic out of their father’s possession. They hire ‘The Thief of Thieves’ Sheikh Sin to burglar Hashim’s house and help them steal the artifact in exchange for Huma and her mother’s jewelry (Ashramblings, 2018). Unfortunately, things don’t work out for Hashim, his children, and his wife.

The divine curse on the relic causes havoc, and Hashim’s family, together with Sin’s families, are punished by the artifact’s curse. The relic subjects Hashim into strange illnesses of ‘swollen, distended…ooze uncontrollably for his every bodily opening’ (Rushdie, 206). Such are the punishments he receives for his religious fanatic, intolerant, and violent of the religion of Prophet Muhammed. Hashim, together with his children, are poetically punished for their religious intolerance and dies at the end of the story. The entire household of Hashim is not spared as the traditions, and religious fundamentalisms render his wife insane. Rushdie’s punishment of his major characters like Hashim, his children Atta and Huma as well as Sin is a representation of poetic justice in the book The Prophet’s Hair.

References

Ashramblings (2018). The Prophet’s Hair by Salman Rushdie. Retrieved from:             http://www.ashramblings.com/2018/01/review-prophets-hair.html?m=1

Rushdie, S. (2016). The Prophet’s Hair. Vintage.