Analysis Of The Mimic Men By Naipaul

A House for Mr. Biswas deals with a theme of deeper significance, the theme of selfhood where an individual quests for identity and struggles to acquire a personal place for which the ‘’House’’ stands as an evocative symbol all through. The possibility of acquiring a personal place in the New World is suggestive of a fragile hope. In this novel, Naipaul also expresses a hope for the developing a unity or a kind of bond among the people in this world. Soon after this, in The Mimic Men, we find that hope gives way to utter despair and hopelessness. Naipaul, in fact, launches the act of purgation of his system of all dreams of possibility in his non-factional work An Area of Darkness. We may, in actuality in his non-factional work. We may, in

The book An Area of Darkness thus records the failure of his attempts to come to terms with it. During his stay in India Naipaul realized that racial similarities had no meaning and that his Trinidadian upbringing and western education had rendered him a colonial without a country, an international man, a product of an empire that had withdrawn. The book, in a way, comes handy to purge his soul of India.

In the latter book India: A Wounded Civilization Naipaul adopts a pragmatic approach to prove his point on the postcolonial society. What he seeks and hears around in India, he relates to men who reflect or transmit culture, to concepts, and assumptions such as “Dharma’’ and “Karma” at the back of the Hindu attitude. He finds Gandhi and R.K. Narayan as more or less representing the old morality, and Vijay Tendulkar and U.R. Ananthamurthy as reflecting the inadequacy “new morality,’’ whereby individuals realizing the inadequacy of post myths strike out on their own. Naipaul says, in the “Foreword’’ India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home, and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it . Thus the spiritual fix in which he finds himself while he is face to face with India is not of divided Loyalties but of divided energies. This is what Naipaul says of Gandhi in An Area of

The Indian background from which he comes is submerged in a mixed culture whose other components is equally croded and twisted, and it exercises an oppressive hold on people’s sentiments. The West Indian and East Indian cultures are products of cultural displacement oppressed by a sense of dereliction. The absence of any well–defined traditions promotes or necessitates such pragmatic qualities as cleverness, resourcefulness, common sense, and manipulation of people and circumstances. The need to survive becomes the immediate requirement of the individuals, and all of Naipaul’s characters turn out to be experts in what art of surviving at all odds. Naipaul is very much interested in what happens to individuals in a colonial ethos. It is in tracing the rites of passage through which these individuals have to pass that Naipaul the ironist surfaces. One of the major themes of Naipaul’s work is the colonial artist discovering his own artistic potentialities. For a West Indian writer who is disinherited by all traditions and at the same time exposed to all traditions, the problem of becoming a writer is in itself an assertion, of independence and identity. Living is in borrowed culture, the west Indian, more the most, needs writers to tell him who he is and where he stands. Naipaul’s work is in sense as implicit