A Postcolonial Reading Of V.S. Naipaul’s Travel Writing

V.S. Naipaul is a world famous postcolonial writer. He has long proved himself a master in the genre of travel writing. Naipaul has traveled to different parts of the world, especially the newly independent nations, known as the Third World, and reports on the social and cultural problems he has seen with his own eyes. Naipaul has been praised for the honesty of his views on the issues of the Third World, though criticized for his "spitting" on his people.Based on previous studies as well as this author’s personal reading experience, this thesis scrutinizes Naipaul’s travel writing through India:A Million Mutinies Now and The Masque of Africa from the perspective of postcolonial theory. It holds the view that Naipaul’s travel writing represents his two-fold investment of the contemporary world both socially and personally manifested in his travel books as historical writing and autobiographical writing. His journeys among the third world parallel with the spiritual journeys of his self quest. It also holds that this is through Naipaul’s two-fold journeys of third world quest and his own identity quest that Naipaul’s ambivalence is revealed. The thesis further holds that Naipaul’s journeys of traveling and writing indicate his unique perspective of observing the world and the self. Only through traveling and writing can he possibly establish a dialogue between different cultures:the center and the periphery; only in traveling and writing does he feel at home.