"miguel Street" Irony Narrative Research

Miguel Street is the work which starts V. S. Naipaul on the road to a career as a brilliant author which lasts over half a century. The novel is a collection of 17 close-knit short stories which presents a panorama of Trinidad society in the colonial period. A strong tone of irony permeates every aspects of the novel, from language, narrative strategy to its very theme. In Miguel Street, irony goes far beyond a rhetorical device. Instead, it's the narrative strategy of the whole novel.The irony of view-point is the key to unlock the secret of irony in Miguel Street. What a child perceives can be quite different from what an adult does. This makes the view point of a child quite unique perspective and it also helps to create a textual tension which is essential to the irony in Miguel Street. Besides the irony of view-point, other forms of irony include verbal irony, irony of tone and situational irony. Verbal irony is a statement in which what is ostensibly expressed differs sharply from what is implied. The irony of tone means that the narrative tone is apparently inconsistent with the nature of the story. In situational irony, the character expects the opposite of what the readers know that fate holds in store.Due to the narrative irony in Miguel Street, the true meaning remains implicit rather than explicit. And what is narrated and what is implied form a contrast and tension which makes the text capable of more than one interpretations. Moreover, the irony in the novel creates a double-perspective which allows the readers to observe Miguel Street and Trinidad from inside as well as outside. The duality and complexity of Naipaul's identity, to some extent, accounts for the ambiguity of the irony in Miguel Street.