CS THEORY - ENTRY TICKET #1.

'Haroun and the sea of stories' Analysis

Salman Rashid’s Haroun and the sea of stories is essentially a tale about people from a magical land. The story opens up in ‘The saddest of cities’ situated in Alifbay. The main protagonist is Haroun from which is a brave and curious child.

The sad city is ‘a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name’. In the north of the city there are ruined buildings ‘that look like broken hearts’. Furthermore in the North of the city there are allegedly factories that manufacture sadness. We know this because it claims ‘(so I’m told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world’. Also it is next to the ‘sea of glummish’ which is named due to the depression that is ridden over the land.

Haroun says to his farther ‘What’s the point of it, what’s the point of telling stories that aren’t even true? This was a turning point for part of the plot in the story as this was the reason that his farther stopped telling stories ‘The fabled Saha of Blah stood up in front of a huge audience, opened his mouth and found that he had run out of stories to tell’.  

When Haroun is at the streams of the sea of stories the genie says gravely, ‘it’s pollution’. This is when Haroun realises that the sea of stories is being poisoned.

‘His name, whispered the water genie, and the sky darkened for an instant as he spoke it, is Khattam Shud. Far away on the horizon, fork lightning glittered once. Karan felt his blood run cold.’ This is the point in the story where the antagonist is introduced to Haroun who has very little information about him although he ‘had not forgotten what his farther said about Khattam Shud’. Just before this it says ‘Iff and Butt shivered with something very like fear ’which shows that there is fear that surrounds Khattam Shud’s name.

Iff says ‘ordinary armies are made up of platoons and regiments and suchlike; our pages are organised into chapters and volumes’. This is where iff relates there army as ‘Library’ which connotes the fact that they use the power of stories to fight war. Furthermore they introduce General Kitab’s name to Haroun in the story’.

When Haroun comes across the Eggheads they claim ‘ ”We are the eggheads”. They nodded’ they then go on to saying ‘We can’t believe you don’t know this’ as they point towards the grand balcony and say ‘He’s the walrus’. In the story the walrus is the head of the P2C2E (Processes too complicated to explain), in order to get his father’s story water turned on again he Haroun needs to speak with him. 

Soon after Haroun was introduced to the Walrus the king attempted a speech but failed. The prince then exclaimed that the princess had been kidnapped ‘they have seized her’. This the point from which the city is told that khattam Shud has captured the princess and most likely taken her to Chup City in his Ice Castle.