Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (2017) explores the rise and fall of the wealthy immigrant family—the Goldens—in New York, narrated retrospectively by their neighbour and confidant, Rene, whose selective remembering exposes how self-mythologized performances unravel precarious identities, thereby leading to vulnerable futures. The cinematic narration by Rene renders the Golden family’s lineage a performative construct rather than a stable core. This article examines the fluidity of narrative memory in the work, The Golden House, arguing that the novel constructs identity as narratively produced, precarious, and vulnerable. Memory in the novel operates as fluid narrative mediation, continually reshaping personal and familial identities. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity and Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of socially framed memory, the study reconceptualizes memory not as archival preservation but as an active, selective, and mediated act of storytelling. This instability of storytelling constructed through strategic remembering and structured forgetting generates unstable and fragile identities that open onto vulnerable futures in which lineage, belonging, and authority remain exposed. By situating identity within the shifting terrain of narrative memory, The Golden House reimagines futurity as structurally open, ethically uncertain, and irreducibly unstable.

Authors:
Roshina Regie, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India

About the Presenter(s)
Working at the intersections of memory, narrative form, and 21st-century fiction, Ms. Roshina Regie is presently pursuing a PhD in English at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India, examining narrative fluidity and precarity in contemporary literature.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roshina-regie-31a048210

See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule

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