¶ … Perforated Sheet" and "One out of Many" In "The Perforated Sheet" by Salmon Rushdie and "One out of Many" by V. S. Naipaul, the two many characters are isolated from the world and yet are part of the world in a complex way. In this manner the two stories are similar. At the same time, they are very different in that "One out of Many" is told from the first-person perspective while "The Perforated Sheet" has a narrator but the main story is really third-person driven. The stories are also different in terms of subject and style, though the theme of isolation may be viewed as similar. This paper will compare and contrast the two stories in this manner.

The theme of isolation is apparent in both stories as each deals with an individual who is in the world but yet strangely not of the world. Santosh, for example, now lives in Washington, D. C., but he misses his life in Bombay, though he would not return to it if he could because he feels so detached from everything -- like his life back there in Bombay and even before it in the hills with his wife and children was from another era and one he cannot really go back to. He lives in Washington and works and sometimes goes out but he is not part of the community though he lives in a community. He is cut off because of his many fears and worries and sense of nothingness. He contemplates...

To be empty is to be calm. It is to renounce" (Naipaul 55). After taking another wife and becoming a legal citizen he reflects on his newfound security and what it means to his situation: "All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body" -- beyond this it has given him no purpose beyond the material life, which is barely purposeful for him. Likewise, the doctor in Rushdie's story is part of the community, but not of the community. He renounces his god after hitting his nose on the ground (which is like an act of isolation) and though he is called upon to heal a client's daughter, he is not allowed to view her because of the father's insistence on her modesty. Thus, the doctor is literally cut off from society even though he is in the society.
The two stories are different in that "One out of Many" is told from the point-of-view of Santosh, which makes it very personal as it is about himself. "The Perforated Sheet," however, is told from the point-of-view of Saleem and it is not about him but rather about his grandfather the doctor, so it is much more of a third-person perspective. Rushdies even has his narrator apologize for this to the reader because it is obviously a…