A critical study of women characters in the major fiction of V S Naipaul

Abstract

The thesis highlights the crucial aspect of portrayal of female characters in the works of V. S. Naipaul. As a novelist Naipaul is an international figure and exceptional in that matter. Like Patrick White, Katherine Mansfield, Chinua Achebe, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and others, he wrote voluminously. His prolificacy is enormous and admirable. There is no other writer in the Third World who can excel him in quality and quantity. This Nobel Laureate is the most admired contemporary novelist today. His writing dealt with the cultural confusion of the Third World and the problem of an outsider, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indian in England and a nomadic intellectual in a post-colonial world. newlineThe son of Indian immigrants to Trinidad and a member of the highest caste, a Brahmin, Naipaul is not only the narrator or reporter who perceives a displeasing situation as a sensation. It is also always his own life that he puts on display, and it is a broken ethos that he as a philosopher of culture has to defend. However, his empathy concerning the people he encounters on his travels and whose lives and cultures he describes is broken. He has never shied away from voicing vehemently and inconsiderately his dislike of certain cultural expressions. In The Middle Passage, for instance, as soon as the ship that had taken Naipaul from England back to Trinidad on a tour of the Caribbean docked in Port of Spain. I began to feel all my old fear of Trinidad 1 together with the resentment of the steel bands that used to be regarded as a high manifestation of West Indian culture, and it was a sound I detested. 2 A few sentences later he describes Trinidad as unimportant, uncreative, cynical, a country in which Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one 3 newlineNaipaul is a traveler, cosmopolitan with a, historically speaking, universal philosophy, a specialist when it comes to describes societal changes and intolerance, Chauvinism, fanaticism and religious fundamentalism, declin