A Carnival Study Of The Characters In Miguel Street

Miguel Streetstarts Naipaul's over half century writing career and plays a pivotal role in his life.It is a collection of seventeen short stories in which colonized people lead a poor and miserable life but have to seek joy amidst sorrow.Colorful characters in the Miguel Street are crowned and de-crowned subsequently and even mimic mechanically the poet,judge and language of colonial country,all of these behaviors just accord with carnival rituals of Bakhtin's carnival poetics.In addition,people's daily utterances,like Janus with two faces,express a pair of opposite meanings.In order to pursue the ideal Utopia and realize the subversion of colonial culture in some way,they have done a number of ridiculous and strange things.Thus it can be seen that people in Miguel Street are all lost in their own carnival life and unofficial world,so the street is full of carnival atmosphere everywhere.Most scholars abroad and in China pay more attention to narrative strategies,post-colonial and marginal analysis of Miguel Street,while few scholars interpret this work from carnival perspective.This thesis purports to analyze different kinds of carnival life of many mad characters in Miguel Street,explore their carnival sense of the world and excavate the bitterness and suffering under the carnival life.This thesisconsists of five parts.In the first part the writer makes an introduction to V.S.Naipaul and Miguel Street and a review of Naipaul's and the work's study abroad and at home,introduces the theory frame-work,analyzes the research motivation and significance as well as describing the organization of the thesis.Then Chapter One of body part analyzes the mad characters' carnival rituals concentrating on Man-man's and Big Foot's crowning and de-crowning as well as Morgan's and B.Wordsworth's mimicry.These crazy and mad people lead their own carnival lives in individual ritualsunder the long-time colonial domination.However,they cannot escape the ending of waking up from their dreams without nothing.Chapter Two explores the characters' utterances in their daily and carnival life including indirect verbal irony,vulgar words and the local music—calypso.People's carnival appeals are reflected by their utterances through which people express the depressed emotion.Chapter Three illustrates the carnival sense of the world from three aspects of utopian life,subversion and duality on the carnival square.This chapter chiefly excavates the characters' psychological activity and discusses their inner double feelings in the heart.The final part is a conclusion,which summarizes the carnival rituals,carnival language and carnival sense of the world of the carnival characters.This part also puts forward the philosophical connotation of carnival life,and then scrutinizes people's doomed endings again under the colonial condition.The colorful characters in Miguel Street are leading carnival life to forget the sorrows and helplessness from the hopeless life.However,when they return to the real life,they recognize that they cannot get rid of the colonized dilemma.