Docility And Resistance

V. S. Naipaul is an outstanding representative of the English writers. With hisancestral home in India, V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad which was once colonizedby Britain and acquired English citizenship later. He leads a vagrant life for his wholelife, which instead helps him produce a lot of excellent works. Half a Life (2001) andMagic Seeds (2004), Naipaul’s two last novels, have caught the critics’ eyes both athome and abroad in recent years. Half a Life is about Willie’s wandering and pointlessfirst half of life; Magic Seeds is about the latter half of life of Willie who strove tolocate his identity and spiritual home. In the two novels, the author demonstrates forus the confusion about their identity of the lost people from the Third World and theirendeavor to locate themselves.Through Foucault’s theory on power, this thesis will analyze how the protagonistof the two novels, Willie, tried to find his cultural identity respectively as a docilesubject and a rebellious subject in the disciplinary Indian society full of the colonialdisciplines, and conclude the feasible ways to find their cultural identity for the lostpeople from the Third World in Naipaul’s eye. This paper will be divided into sixparts. Part one will introduce the life and works of Naipaul, the literature review onHalf a Life and Magic Seeds, the study questions and the significance of the study.Part two will focus on the theory used in the thesis: Foucault’s theory on thedisciplinary power and the relationship between power relations and confrontationstrategies. Part three will analyze how Willie, tamed by the Indian society filled withthe colonial disciplines, strived to find his cultural identity. Part four will discuss theefforts made by the rebellious Willie to find his cultural identity in the Indian societystill haunted by the colonial disciplines. Based upon the author’s own experience, partfive will discuss how to construct their real cultural identity for the lost people fromthe Third World in the author’s opinion. Part six is the conclusion of the thesis: Theexperiences of Willie and the author himself provide a clear picture of the harm doneto the Third World people by the colonial disciplines. Many of them are stillwandering on the journey to search for their cultural identity due to such harm. Butthe ways to construct the cultural identity figured out by Naipaul during his writingprocess point out the right direction for those lost people fumbling on the journey tofind their cultural identity.