Reinventing the Self

BORN IN 1932 IN AN IMPOVERISHED HINDU community of Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul moved to England in 1950, where he spent most of his life. As a writer of Indo-Caribbean origin, Naipaul has an important place in Caribbean literary history, which is haunted by colonialism, imperialism and neo-colonialism. Despite the fact that Naipaul claims not to adhere to any political principles in his work, his literature tends to become a form of resistance to colonial and postcolonial configurations across national and cultural borders. Scholars like Angus Richmund have criticised Naipaul for being “the mimic man”1 who merely documents colonial anxieties or insecurities in his work, although he may appear to be preoccupied with the predicament of the formerly colonised people in our postmodern world. His anti/heroes do not show an active resistance to the remnants of colonialism, but rather a passive one as they refuse to conform to the fantasies of the West. These fantasies are rooted in cultural othering, which appears to haunt his lonely and solitary characters who as a result tend to possess floating or fragmented identities. According to Min Zhou,