Identity, Exile And Mimicry

At the end of the 1970s,"post-colonialism"as a discipline came into being with the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Since then it has gradually become the focus of attention in the field of critical theories, particularly in the field of literary criticism. Nowadays, the most famous representatives of post-colonial theorists are Edward Said, Gayatri Chakakravorty Spivak, and Hommi Bhabha. Although post-colonial theorists vary from one another in specific points, they express a common concern towards the interaction between the mother country culture and the colonized culture caused by power relations.As postcolonial theory has become the focus of attention in the field of criticism in the western academic world, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has been accordingly offered the label as a postcolonial writer. V.S.Naipaul is the 2001 Nobel Prize winner in literature"for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories". Born in Trinidad and educated in Oxford University, Naipaul perceives himself as an alien in all the continents where he has lived. Naipaul is really fit to reflect upon cultural displacement or loss that colonial and postcolonial people have encountered. He has been greatly concerned with the problems and dilemmas of colonial and postcolonial societies, therefore postcolonial thematic concerns, such as displacement, cultural identity, isolation, exile, mimicry and cultural conflicts inform his writings.The present thesis is an attempt to give an interpretation of A Bend in the River by V.S.Naipaul from the perspective of post-colonialism. In this fiction, V.S.Naipaul narrates three kinds of possibilities of postcolonial people in the journey of seeking cultural identity: Ferdinand sticks to national culture and resists western culture; Indar tries his best to tramp past and attempts to follow the examples of westerners; Salim suffers the loss of cultural identity and only walks on the way. In the meanwhile, Naipaul presents a few exiles'dilemmas of existing at the bend in the river in the postcolonial society, such as Salim, Indar, Mahesh, Shoba, Father Huismans, Raymond, Yevtte, and Metty. These exiles in Africa suffered displacement and confusion from their inability either to cultivate their own past or to merge more intimately with the world around them. Moreover, this fiction deals with the theme of mimicry and describes the mimicry behaviors of the"Big Man"(the President) and the common African people. At first, the"Big Man"attempts to mimic the colonizer due to the desire for the order or power. And then the common people try their best to mimic the colonizer owing to the"desire for becoming the recognizable other". The choice, which they have to make, derives from doubling the white man's image. In so doing, they want to"displace the representation of the authority".Therefore, A Bend in the River is novel mainly concerning the postcolonial theme of cultural identity, exile, isolation, mimicry, cultural conflicts and so on, and undoubtedly it is a good novel that explores the postcolonial society in detail. Thus, the postcolonial reading done in this thesis is intended to better our understanding of this novel.