At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers

by Salman Rushdie

- Deconstructive analysis

The short story by Salman Rushdie presents a consumerist society in which everything

is for sale at public auctions, from parents and children to the Eiffel Tower and Taj Mahal. The

basic rule of this consumerist society is that everything revolves around money and people

who have the most money also have the most power since they can possess more things. At

the opposite end, if you do not have money, you can even die without anyone batting an eye,

like in the case of the astronaut who is stuck in space waiting for his death because there are

not enough money to bring him back, but everything that seems the center of the narrative

actually becomes the marginal in the end.

By placing this story in a consumerist society in which money is the most important

because it can buy you everything you want, material possession becomes the main center of

the story. Thus, the narrator talks about how people would buy anything that could give them

a social status or just help them satisfy their consumerist needs, without any purpose to the

acquisition.

At the opposite end, the spiritual needs are marginalized, considered unimportant in

this world in which the material needs become the essentials of ones life. The marginalization

of the spiritual needs is represented through the exclusion from the auction of the priests.

Thus, everyone can participate at the auction because Anyones cash is as good as anyone

elses, except of course, from the most important representatives of the spiritual world. But

this marginalization is only apparent, because we can easily see that it is actually spirituality

that they all seek and this produces a re-centering of the text around the importance of
spirituality which was previously presented as marginalized. This way, the narrator wants to

buy the ruby slippers so that he can win back his former lover, orphans want to buy it so that

they can reunite with their parents and everybody desires them because it is said they have the

power to take them back to normality, so in a world in which the importance is shifted back to

the spiritual needs.

Another element that is marginalized at the beginning of the story is the isolation of

the astronaut who has to die on Mars because there is no money to bring him back. This may

seem like it makes of him another marginal element, but since everybody looks at him at

some point in the story and suffers together with him, he becomes a center of focalization in

the story. Moreover, the fact that he is outside this world makes of him what they actually all

desire: to escape from this world, and thus the marginal becomes the center once again.

But the story deconstructs more than the elements mentioned earlier in the analysis.

Thus, time and space do not seem to exist anymore. They live in a world from which they

would want to escape and cannot do it, but at the same time people from other times and

places come here. Thus, children from the nineteenth century are there, movie stars come out

of the movie screens and even literary characters participate in the auction. Moreover, at some

point, the narrator seems to be the only real person there, because all the other auctioneers

communicate through screens and telephones. By playing on this collision of time and space

the story shifts emphasis on the idea that no matter the time or place we live in, a consumerist

society will always have the same targets: to buy, even if there is of no use to us. This leads us

to another element that is deconstructed in the text, that is, what people bid for, because most

of the objects that are auctioned for have no actual value or even materiality. Thus, the Taj

Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx, wives, husbands, state secrets or even a

wide selection of human souls of all classes, qualities, ages, races and creeds are all up for

bidding. This means that the buying process does not have a purpose in its own, since most of
the things taken out for auction do not have an actual value or purpose for which they could

be bought.

From the examples given, we can see that even though the text seems to focus on the

material aspects of this consumerist society, it is actually the spirituality and the possibility of

escaping from this world that are actually in the center.