Balancing Harmony

In The Harmony of the Spheres a short story by Salman Rushdie. Eliot Crane is a paranoid schizophrenic who kills himself. His reason why we all lose our minds is that it’s “a simple biochemical imbalance” (Rushdie , 134).  Eliot sometimes doesn’t take his medicine, and falls into a schizophrenic episode. During one of his episodes, he got in his car, covered his eyes with a blindfold and started driving. Not only did he start driving blindfolded he was driving all over the place.

In this book Eliot Crane is an author. He uses his schizophrenic episodes, as a means of brainstorming ideas for his writing. Since Eliot uses his schizophrenic as a catalyst for his writings it’s also a contributing factor to his illness. He doesn’t take his medication so that he can have an episode in which he can write about. After Eliot’s death, the narrator was asked to clean up after Eliot. Only to find that after all his episodes he eventually started to lose reality. The narrator noticed that a year prior to his death, Eliot stopped writing and ranting in notebooks which were full of ravings.

In the boat, Lucy said it best to the narrator when “sometimes I think everything would have been a lot easier if I hadn’t rolled away” (Rushdie, 135). What Lucy was trying to says is that if only she had just left Eliot her life would be in balance. Lucy was better off without Eliot. But, Eliot would have been worst if she would have left him. This is shown when she left him for only seventy days.

Salman Rushdie’s other novels ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ and ‘At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,’ are stories about restoring balance and harmony. In Prophet’s Hair, the only way to restore balance was to return the hair to the temple where its rightful place was. In the novel ‘At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,’ the only way to restore balance was to win the ruby slippers for Gale. Unlike in the prophet’s hair there was a balance in life after he left the auction house. Whereas; in the Prophets hair there was never a balance, his family had misfortune by their wages being reduced.