Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“From this we can deduce that, whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses. I will try to understand what it was about in this book.”

Rushdie alludes to the fact that Matar did not bother to learn more than the bare minimum about him before trying to kill him. Although Rushdie announces here that understanding Matar’s motivations for the attack is at least one purpose of writing Knife, in subsequent chapters he notes that the book’s purpose is to reclaim the narrative as a form of what he is reluctant to call therapy—but is, in essence, therapeutic or cathartic. The text better supports the latter claim of purpose, since it explores but does not reach clear conclusions about what motivated Matar’s attack.

“Henry James’s last words were ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ Death was coming at me, too, but it didn’t strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic.”

Rushdie’s references to famous authors and thinkers—in this case Henry James—creates ethos, but the frequency of these references also creates a slightly pretentious tone. Rushdie contrasts his own experience of the approach of death with James’s here: He views it as a relic of the past for two reasons: because this kind of religiously motivated violence is out of place in modern times and because Matar is attempting to carry out a decades-old death edict from Rushdie’s own distant past.