The three short stories collected in Part 2, “West,” are all set in European settings and toy with popular Western tales to explore the Search for Home and Belonging. Whereas the stories in Part 1, “East,” are more provincial tales of hardship set in South Asia, “Yorick,” “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” and “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship” are stories which centralize adventure, discovery, and the pursuit of satisfaction beyond the insular confines of the quotidian. Rushdie uses allusions to William Shakespeare, The Wizard of Oz, and Christopher Columbus to capture the fantastical promises of life in the West. He is toying with Western cultural figures and fairy tales to explore how Western culture historically holds the impossible promise of utopia. However, in all three short stories, these promises of everlasting life and ultimate happiness fall flat.

In the short story “Yorick,” a young Hamlet from Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet seeks a sense of belonging in his fraught relationship with his father’s jester, Yorick. In this retelling of the Shakespearean classic, Hamlet is “a lonely child, who saw in Yorick a father as well as a servant” and a mother (71). Hamlet has almost no interaction with his father, King Horwendillus, or his mother, Queen Gertrude, throughout the fable. His idyllic royal existence is devoid of typical human and familial comfort. For example, he must go to Yorick (instead of his parents) for daily entertainment and struggles to sleep without his mother’s goodnight kiss. These dynamics convey his desperate longing for love and care. When Hamlet goes to find his mother on the night of the banquet, he overhears his parents’ lovemaking as his father’s violence against his mother: “It is a porky-snuffling Horwendillo beneath whom Queen Gertrude sobs and flails, —and then falls quiet, while her breath sounds harsh in Hamlet’s ears, as if her throat were stopped” (75). Love resembles violence to the youthful Hamlet, thus shattering his idyllic notions of parental care and connection. 

He becomes even more convinced that his father is dangerous when he beats him for what he believes is his own heroic act: saving his mother’s life. Relations quickly become distorted in the Danish palace thereafter, leading to a series of grotesque and hyperbolic incidents wherein everyone but Yorick’s son dies. This reinvention of Shakespeare’s play seeks to explain the convoluted, murderous plot points of the original tragedy, while highlighting the darker side behind the famous bard’s characters and their motives. The narrator—who alleges he found this version of the story written on an ancient piece of parchment—deems the tale “such a COCK-AND-BULL story” (83). He casts doubt on the story, because he is casting doubt on the European myths of happiness and belonging.

The stories “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” and “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship” similarly interrogate the meaning of home as it relates to the known and unknown worlds. In “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” the narrator is determined to buy the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz movie to give them to his ex-girlfriend and “soulmate,” Gale. The slippers themselves symbolize home; in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is supposed to click the slippers’ heels and say “There’s no place like home” to transport herself back to her own home in Kansas. In Rushdie’s story, the wandering, estranged, and searching narrator hopes that procuring the “pair of magic shoes” might “take us home” (93) both to the physical place he belongs and to the metaphoric home he felt in his relationship with Gale. Finding home and belonging means seeking out the impossible. 

In “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella Consummate Their Relationship,” the Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella characters are seeking similar forms of fulfillment. Columbus is determined to win Isabella’s favor so he can secure his three ships and brave the unknown Atlantic Ocean in search of the new world. Initially, Queen Isabella is reluctant to help Columbus, but soon discovers that Columbus’s prospective overseas adventures are the key to her own satisfaction. Her dream reveals “that she will never, never, NEVER! be satisfied by the possession of the Known. Only the Unknown, perhaps even the Unknowable, can satisfy her” (116). Home and belonging, fulfillment and contentment are always just out of reach for the characters in these two short stories. They have bought into the myths of the West, and been culturally conditioned to always want more.

In these ways, the short stories collected in “West” also further the collection’s theme of The Illusions Provided by False Stories and Promises. In “Yorick,” the narrator seeks some new truth behind the Hamlet characters’ motives and fates through a newly discovered iteration of the Shakespearean tragedy; this tale however proves dubious and its events a flimsy explanation for the famous play. 

In “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” the narrator discovers that his attempts to buy the ruby slippers and win back his ex-lover Gale are futile. The Gale he wants is more a figment of his imagination and fabrication of half memories than a real person. Bidding on the slippers is similarly an act of imaginative work; the higher and higher their cost goes, the more his “goal crosses a delirious frontier. Its achievement and our own survival become—yes!—fictions” (102). The narrator ultimately abandons his design, because he recognizes that it is unachievable; his longing has become so great that it has divorced him from reality. 

In the final story, “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship,” the characters also end up in a surreality where they are driven by the pursuit of the impossible. Dreams dictate their actions and behaviors, proving the power of myth and superstition to drive human behavior and to endlessly propel one’s pursuit of supposed truth and meaning.