WEST INDIAN RESPONSE TO V. S. NAIPAUL'S WEST INDIAN WORKS (TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO)

This dissertation documents West Indian response to those works, both fiction and nonfiction, in which Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has treated West Indian subject matter. Naipaul, who is a gifted writer to emerge from the Caribbean but one who makes harsh statements about the region, is a painful and controversial figure to West Indians and has provoked a tremendous number of responses. This dissertation gives detailed treatment of this wide range of materials, including not only articles published and lectures delivered abroad by West Indians but also criticisms in West Indian journals, periodicals, and newspapers. This study thus garners and synthesizes information not easily accessible to readers outside the region.;The first chapter gives an overview of the cultural, social, and political life of East Indians in the Caribbean and thus provides the context necessary to intrepreting Naipaul's works and response to them. The second chapter deals with the constraints placed on Naipaul as a West Indian artist living in self-imposed exile. The remaining four chapters present, in chronological order, a critical analysis of each of Naipaul's West Indian works and examine West Indian reaction to each. (The only exception to chronology is Chapter V, which covers all of Naipaul's West Indian journalistic nonfiction.) Although British and American reviews are considered and compared with Caribbean reviews, the criticism by West Indians is emphasized. The Appendix of this study uses the same methodology in presenting Indian reaction To Naipaul's books on his ancestral land, India.;From this examination of West Indian and Indian criticism, it is evident that while Naipaul is received with ambivalence, the current dominant perception among critics is that his books are anti-West Indian, his standards Euro-centered, and his sensibility Brahmin.