A New Historical Study Of V. S. Naipaul’s A Way In The World

As the prize-winner of Nobel Laureate of Literature for 2001, V. S. Naipaul has firmly established his position as one of the best living English writers in the contemporary world. Descendant of Indians as he is, Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. Then in 1950, he went to England on a scholarship and finally lived in Wiltshire. Thus Naipaul is naturally marked with the complex background, which makes him a typical product of multi-ethnic/cultural setting and gives him a detached vision, both within and without a distance, to perceive the history and reality in former colonies.Having been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, A Way in the World, a 1994 book by Naipaul, is a representative work in Naipaul’s later literary creation. Since its publication, it is well-acclaimed among Western and Eastern critics. Different from traditional work of fiction, the book can be loosely termed as a ’novel’ or a ’sequence’, which is made of nine linked and complementary narratives, including autobiography, fiction, history and memoirs. It concentrates on a central objective examination of the colonial history and the predicament of ex-colonials who were struggling in the mixed modern world.Based on the theory of New Historicism, this paper aims to analyze Naipaul’s reenactment of the colonial history distorted by a master narrative and to demonstrate how the individual reaches the self-knowledge in specific cultural and historical context. Thus, behind such concerns as above are Naipaul’s perceptions of history that history as a narrative is an open text about the past, and it is also a stepping stone for people to move on to the space of spiritual and intellectual growth within their own historical experience. Besides, it will be further explored how Naipaul himself gets self-fashioned as a global writer through his act of writing. At last, in the conclusion, on the one hand, Naipaul writes into history the ambivalences, contradictions, tragedies and ironies that attend it, so histories tend to become variations on a master narrative; on the other hand, by approaching to history from different views, people will find different roads of history. Here what Naipaul narrates in the novel is just a road of history in the world.