A Study Of Ecological Crisis In V.S.Naipaul's A Bend In The River

V.S.Naipaul is the most remarkable immigrant writer in British literary world and is the first Nobel Prize winner in 21 st century.He has published thirty-three books in his life.Among his works,A Bend in the River is considered to be one of the best novels.It shows readers that what the great changes brought to Africans only are the rebellions after the small country won its independence.The President adopts radical policies,and destroys the ecology of nature,politics and culture of Africa,leading to the difficulty in developing their countries.At present,scholars both at home and abroad mainly analyze the theme of this novel from the perspectives of post-colonialism,new historicism and contrastive literature and so on.A few scholars have done the researches from the angle of ecological holism.Therefore,based on the domestic and foreign researches,this thesis analyzes the phenomenon of the crises of nature,politics and culture from the perspective of ecological holism.This thesis consists of five chapters.The introduction outlines the life and works of Naipaul,and then does a brief introduction of A Bend in the River.It gives a comprehensive and brief literature review of the current research status both at home and abroad.And it points out the significance of this research.The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.In the first chapter,based on the perspective of ecological holism,the thesis analyzes the natural ecological crisis that the small country faced.The bush that people depend on is deliberately ruined and deforested when the people are undertaking the modernization.And their excessive plunder of animal resources results in the outbreak of Ebola virus,which manifests the imbalance between human beings and nature.The second chapter analyzes the political crisis in this novel by using ecological holism for the blindly mimicry of West of President,which leads to the crisis of the construction of country,and the identity crisis of Zabeth and her son Ferdinand towards new Africa.And Salim,an immigrant,has the crisis of his identity to his mother land as well.The third chapter analyzes the crisis of survival of traditional culture in this small country,resulting from the backwardness of traditional culture;and the assimilation of African local religions is influenced by western cultural hegemony.And with the invasion ofChristianity and Islam,traditional religion of Africa is assimilated.Hence,the original belief is shocked,which leads to the crisis of ecology of African culture.The conclusion summarizes the full text and points out that all crises are caused by the violation of the natural law.Therefore,Africans fail to construct a harmonious society in which nature,politics and culture can coexist during the process of reconstruction.Thus,Naipaul also exposes the common problems faced by African countries and even among all the third world countries.