On The Duality In V.S.Naipaul's Novels A Postcolonial Analysis Of A House For MR.Biswas

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is both one of the most highly regarded and one of the most controversial of contemporary writers. All of his literary achievements are inseparable with his background, as he says in his Noble-Lecture "Two Worlds": "everything of value about me is in my books…It's been like this because of my background."V. S. Naipaul was born into an Indian Brahmin family in Trinidad, the West Indies. Being the minority in Trinidad, the Indian immigrants were double marginalized and lived in seclusion with their traditional lifestyle and religion, which lead the young man to become an exile both psychologically and geographically. The young Naipaul was an admirer of English civilization, and unhappy with the spiritual and cultural poverty of Trinidad. Winning a Government scholarship, he went to England to study English literature, and since then England has become his principle residence. When living in England Naipaul is once again a two-displaced exile experiencing alienation and strangeness as the consequence of displacement. Such experience of exile forms his fragmented personality and cultivates his double consciousness of belonging and not belonging, and develops his double perspective of both being insider and outsider. These dual features are in turn reflected in his writings. By means of fictionalized autobiography, the author reenters his own lived experience, and tells his story as if he was the man once again and at same time evaluates and interprets this experience from the perspective of the writer. Because of the split between the perception of Naipaul as the experiencing man and Naipaul as the writer in London, the duality occurs in his novels by combining the colonizer's point of view with the colonized's point of view, merging sympathy with satire toward his fellow peoples, and incorporating English literary tradition with Hindu cultural heritage. The thesis attempts to explore the duality in Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, a novel based on his father's life and writings, which is generally considered as his masterpiece, and the intimacy to his father and Hinduism mixed with Naipaul'own alienation of being an exile makes the novel at once a tragic-comedy and, owing to which the novel takes an important place in West Indian literary history and in the English literary canon as well, and Naipaul himself arouses the international attention. The thesis is made up of five parts. The first part serves as an introduction to the writer's status in literary canon, the study on the writer abroad and at home, the critical theory applied in the thesis, the influence of his background on the writer's creation, and a brief account of A House for Mr. Biswas. Chapter One provides readers the relative information of duality: the duality of the experience of exile and the duality in Naipaul's novels. Chapter two is a detailed analysis of the duality represented in the text: a two-sided story and the love-hate relationship with Hinduism. On the one hand, the novel is a eulogy of the East Indian's struggle for their identity and status in the New World, and on the other hand, it pessimistically points out the immigrant's or the colonial's predicament of alienation, not belonging and homelessness as the consequence of colonialism. Chapter three focuses on the duality in V. S. Naipaul's writing techniques —the doubling narrative and two-directional allusions. The novel is written in third person narrative point of view, but Naipaul changes at times the point of view from the third person omniscient to the third person limited. When the protagonist Mr. Biswas is focalized the vision is out of him, and the narrator onlyinterprets the vision at the beginning or in the middle or at the ending of each scene or plot. Because there is a split between the character's experience and the narrator's knowledge, the novel creates a doubling effect. Furthermore, Naipaul thinks there is no literary tradition in Trinidad to build upon his literary materials, so in his writing, he turns to the English literary tradition and his Hindu cultural heritage so as to create his own way and find his own voice. The last part gives the conclusions of the duality in V. S. Naipaul's novels and makes an objective assessment on the controversial comments on the author with the hope that the analysis of his duality may help to give a better understanding of the author.