The Fractured Self in a Fractured World: Displacement and Identity in V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas And A Bend in the River

Abstract

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. He has won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 2001.He was born in Trinidad, where his family had come from India as workers as an indentured labourers. He spent most of his life in England when he studied his university education in Oxford. Naipaul knew from his own experience because he personally caught between two different worlds. At first, he grow up in one culture and studied in another. He didn’t get the feel fully at home in either. This became the central subject because he truly belonged nowhere. The two novels A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and A Bend in the River (1979) which talks about the person's sense of self only because of colonial history. In both the novels the characters undergone the identity problems but these were all not the personal fall. The reason for this fall is the colonial structure which created by societies in which people could never truly belong. The protagonists’ suffers two different kinds of displacement in both the novels. In A House for Mr. Biswas, Mohun Biswas, the protagonist suffered and trapped by his own colonial society people, where as A Bend in the River picturises a man called Salim who tries to survive in a postcolonial African country but that is crumbled