Location Of The Lost Identity

This thesis, from the perspective of postcolonial identity, studies V.S.Naipaul's deconstruction, reconstruction and relocation of his hybridity identity, which has already lost in the postmodern and postcolonial world, in The Enigma of Arrival. In this important and transitional work, Naipaul experiences a revolution in his identity, through which he re-examines the mixed cultural elements of his identity: Englishness, Indian philosophy and colonial culture represented by his homeland, Trinidad. The re-examination also makes him go through a painful process of accepting the hybridity identity, which he has been rejecting.As the development of postcolonial theory and practice, the study of Naipaul has already turned from text and cultural researches to issues of postcolonial identification in his works. The location of his identity—exile, homelessness and marginality in the metropolitan world has been generally agreed on. Although this location catches the keywords, it would lead to misinterpret Naipaul that he is positioned in cultural vacuum. In this postmodern world marked with cultural hybridity, Naipaul, a representative of postmodern cultural subjects, can not duck the fate of accepting this hybridity identity in the circumstance of culture mixing. As a rising power to break the domain of western discourse power, postcolonial or immigrated writers are also experiencing the crisis of identification. Study of Naipaul's identity reconstruction may help to provide inspirations for them to get out of the identity crisis, which is the very purpose of this thesis.This thesis consists of five parts: Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three and Conclusion. In Introduction, besides a general summary of former researches, there is also a discussion on Naipaul's writing styles and repeated themes. The overlapping themes reflect Naipaul's agonies and struggles for a location of his exile identity in three cultures, which has caused anxieties of homelessness shared by most of the postcolonial exiles and other marginal cultural subjects. The first chapter reviews the history of identity crisis and its features. Studies of identity have been through the Enlightenmental identity, characterized with an isolated and stable self, onwards to the postmodern identity, flexible and acentric. As nationalism is pulled off the myth altar and deconstruction of the binary antagonism, different cultures are coming to hybridity in clashes, which leads to hybridity of cultural identity. Naipaul loses his identity in these clashes of western and eastern cultures, and can not find his cultural and spiritual belonging.Chapter two discusses Naipaul's re-examination and return to Trinidadian and Indian culture, which he has long misunderstood and turned his back on, in the process of identity reconstruction. With English education and the double exile background, Naipaul is stuck in the "Double Exteriority" situation, which, together with his betrayal of Trinidadian and Indian cultures, is the reason of his identity loss. In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul reviews journeys back to Caribbean and India, through which he realizes that either the colonial collective searches for spiritual belonging or Indian Brahmin philosophy on order, life, death and withdrawal has already penetrated into his identity, and influenced his worldviews as well.The third chapter catches Naipaul's controversial attitudes toward Englishness pervading the book and focuses on the complicated relationship between Naipaul and his English "foster culture". The Enigma of Arrival records his settlement with the English identity. After years' marginal experience, Naipaul's Englishness and English culture worship ends up disillusionment. In order to recover from this rip and restore the broken English identity, he withdraws into countryside, where he finds the Victorian Englishness only exists in fantasies. Various people there, becoming sacrifice to this lost identity or moving on to construct a new one, are doubles of Naipaul, who finally help to heal his wound from a ripped identity. Naipaul realizes that a cultural identity in the context of one occlusive culture is doomed to get lost in this multi-cultural world.Conclusion briefly reviews the reality of the identity crisis cultural subjects have to face in this cultural hybridity context. The loss of a certain identity has already suffocated their voices. After a series of rips and pains, Naipaul, the representative of postcolonial exile writers who have been in search of a location for their cultural identity and writing, finally successfully locates his identity in the hybridity culture, a "third-space" position out of constraints of either particular culture. Although this location is a comprising solution, it is their only way out of identity crisis to get acknowledged. This identity location makes them a rising power in the literary world and spokesmen of the marginal cultural subjects in the battle over discourse power..