Arrival Through The Ruins: An Interpretation Of Landscape Images In A Bend In The River And The Enigma Of Arrival

Naipaul's definition of writing derives from the one Arthur Miller gives to newspaper, ' a nation talking to itself, ' Such a definition offers at least one aspect of reading Naipaul's work as "a soul talking to itself. Noteworthily, the soul has equipped itself with tremendous experiences of different identifications, from different perspectives.A Bend in the River is his representative work in the exile years when Naipaul acquainted the readers with the intelligent, mocking narrator. As a self-willed exile, the writer has fully come to the understanding of frustrations, depressions, and a loss of a sense of belonging, all of which he has made the theme of his novels. The Enigma of Arrival is quite different in various aspects. Significantlly, the book is concerned over the topic of "arrival.""Arrival", in Naipaul's sense, points rather to a spiritual fulfillment than the actual action of getting to a destination. It means "elegant, unsurprised" deportment on the basis of "knowing", a wiser attitude of being "in tune with landscapes" wherever he is. The present author intends to illustrate, Naipaul's ideological transition from an exile in A Bend in the River to his "arrival" in The Enigma of Arrival through an analysis of the typical Naipaulian images. One thing has to be pointed out is that the images of ivy and rooks chosen in this thesis are symbols, which evoke not only images of the things but also more further suggestions of the images.The thesis is made up of 5 Chapters. The first two chapters aim at building a proper understanding of Naipaul and making a thorough study of the characteristics of his images. The two successive chapters analyze of the images of hyacinths, ruins, ivy and rooks, which are respectively viewed as the representations of self, other and the mixtures of the self and the other; compare the writer's representations in the two books, and establish the point of view that the writer's ideological binary opposites of the self and the other accomplish its free play in a non-hierarchical way, with the former center, the self embodied by the image of hyacinths decentered. The last chapter discusses "arrival" in Naipaul's perception, and further supports the writer's spiritual arrival from two perspectives: the arrival of the self and the arrival of the other.