At The Auction Of The Ruby Slippers

There’s no place like home There’s no place like home. Home however, is an abstract concept, just out of reach. Humans spend their lives searching for home but as we come close to finding home, it escapes us. But Dorothy’s words are etched in our hearts. Within that statement lies our gift and our curse. There truly is no place like our home—but what is home? Home is a state of contentment. Home is the place where we know that the storm may rage, the fires may burn, but the horrors around us stand in irrelevance. There’s no place like home. In Salman Rushdie’s story, At The Auction of the Ruby Slippers the world has fallen into apparent disarray, and the auction house has risen like a church of consumption. People spend everything they have in an attempt to find some piece of a long forgotten home, hoping to finally find happiness. When the ruby slippers come up to auction the people value slippers because of “their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return” (Rushdie 92). The slippers represent a state of conscious comfort and the hope that it isn’t lost permanently.
It’s even possible that he felt that he no longer knew what home was “ ‘Home’ has become such a scatter, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows anymore.” (Rushdie 93), Rushdie was able to use his own separation to speak to a world lost, and he questions the very nature of home, asking if the slippers can understand metaphors of homeliness (Rushdie 93). He appears to want to redefine homeliness, because maybe in redefinition he will be able to find home himself once