A Tentative Analysis Of The Marginality In V.S.Naipaul's Miguel Street

Miguel Street, a collection of 17 short stories about underclass Trinidadians, is the first book-length work written by V. S. Naipaul. With its humorous language and wonderful characterization, this book won the author the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961 and established his fame as"a portrayer of street life". But more important than that, it represents Naipaul's initial attempt to explore the sense of dispossession and displacement revealed in the marginalized characters of his works. Through this book and his subsequent"fictions"and some of the"nonfictions", Naipaul succeeded in"allowing peripheral figures their place in the momentousness of great literature".As perhaps the most prominent migrant writer in the present world, Naipaul is inescapably branded a status and a strong feeling of being marginalized in the world, which he projects onto the characters in nearly all his fictions and which he continuously explores in himself in his nonfictions. In his works, Naipaul invariably sets the backgrounds in the postcolonial societies and depicts the suppressed and marginalized figures in the world, revealing the status of former colonies as margin to the center of the dominant imperial powers and exploring how the political and cultural hegemony of Europe and North America has affected the fate and psychology of the colonials. His irrefutable commitment to the theme of marginality, which is implicit in his 50 years of writing about non-Western nations and peoples, demonstrates his intense concern for the fate and future of the former colonial countries as well as their inhabitants and their exiles in the Western metropolises.The present thesis expounds on Naipaul's preoccupation with the marginality...