Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Haroun is the protagonist of the story. He is a young boy who is kind, curious, resourceful, and loyal. After his mother leaves his father, Haroun finds it impossible to concentrate for longer than 11 minutes. When his father loses his gift for storytelling, Haroun tries to help him get it back. When he goes to Kahani, he bravely confronts every danger that he faces. Once he understands the stakes of Khattam-Shud’s plan to plug the Wellspring of Stories, he acts from a sense of duty.

At the end of the novel, he is skeptical about what he sees as the false happiness the Walrus has given to his city. He does not want to believe things because they make him feel better; he wants to believe things because they are true, revealing that Haroun has a strict sense of reality and fiction that he can’t absolve. However, he develops as a character in that he now understands that fiction conveys truths in ways that non-fiction cannot.

Iff is a water genie that helps Haroun. It is his job to maintain (or cancel) the subscriptions of those who make use of the Sea of Stories. Combined with Butt the Hoopoe, he contributes to Rushdie’s wordplay by combining the duo into an “Iff” and a “butt.”

Rashid is Haroun’s father. He is a master storyteller who goes by the nicknames, “The Ocean of Notions” and the “Shah of Blah,” depending on whether admirers or detractors are speaking about him. He falls into despair after losing the gift of storytelling. His grief is compounded by the fact that his wife leaves him for Mr. Sengupta, a more serious man who has—in his wife’s words—no imagination. Rashid symbolizes the necessity of storytelling, and the unique gift possessed by those considered to be master storytellers. His stories influence, entertain, educate, and exasperate, sometimes all at once.