On The Marginality Of Naipaul And His Works Under The Post-colony Context

Naipaul is a typical Post-colony writer of literature whose ancestral home is in India. In 1932, he was born in Trinidad, one of Britain's colonies. in 1952 immigrated to Britain. Naipaul not only accepts the Western education but also has imperceptibly come under the influence of the Orient traditional cultures; and he travels to Asia, Africa and Latin America after being engaged on his writing career. The multicultural background, the different thinking ways and his unique personal experience cause Naipaul's writing styles to be out of the ordinary, which help him to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.The dissertation discusses the marginality of Naipaul and his works from three aspects. First, his multicultural background has caused his cultural status to be indefinite and is in a state marginality. Namely he is able to come into both mainstream cultures and the non-mainstream cultures but, at the same time, cause him to be able to dissociate himself from both cultures and to not identify with both. Naipaul adopts the strategy of"Marginality"to deal with the problems which he not only relies on it but also resist it,also makes him become the image of"exile"of Trinidad"medley"culture,"oversea vagabond"of Indian"birth mother"culture,"immigrant"of Britain"foster mother"culture, and"stranger"of African and other"brother"cultures. Secondly, since the marginality of Naipaul himself has a great influence on his literature writing, the characters in his works also have obvious features of marginality. These characters are some puzzled rovers, some immigrants who are incompatible with environments, some imitators with masks, and some schizophrenias and the like. And all the characters in his works are made up imaginarily as well as realistically. Through these characters, what Naipaul attempts to show and inform us is that the immigrants and the colonist emigrating to suzerain are merely rovers and margin-persons for ever regardless of any change of their cultural status. Thirdly, the styles of Naipaul's works also incarnate his unique style of marginality which will be discussed by the dissertation from two perspectives: the causes that Naipaul selects the styles of marginality and the concrete embodiments of marginality in his writing. Naipaul has four major reasons to choose the style of marginality: (1) the change of society and the requirements of the times; (2) the speciality of his identity and his experience; (3) his world view and view of writing; and (4) the author's mentality of composing and readers'mentality of acceptance. The features of marginality of Naipaul's style embody concretely in the following five aspects: (1) the color of autobiography and the arts of representation reflected in his novels; (2) the combination of historical account with novel narration; (3) the writing...