Enigmatic Arrival At The Hybridized Space

V. S. Naipaul is widely famed as one of the most prominent postcolonial writers in the world. His works mainly depict an identity dilemma in the formerly colonized countries such as Trinidad, India and some other nations of Africa in the post-colonial era and enable readers to witness the reality of those post-colonial worlds. In the meantime, his works document the recursive journeys of a struggling soul with a multi-culture background in quest of his self-identity in the post-colonial era while experiencing the spiritual maturation in the process from the negation of his colonial identity to the negotiation among different aspects of his identity, which can be easily traced in his heavily autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival.This thesis adopts postcolonial reading as the framework to explore the theme of arrival in the novel, trying to detect the elements attributed to the development of Naipaul's extraordinary perspective of observing the world and thus seeking for a solution to the problem of identification in today's highly migrant world. The whole thesis consists of three chapters between the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction gives a general view of the Naipaul scholarship on The Enigma of Arrival to explain the significance of the present work; the definition of postcolonial theory and several assumptions are also provided to explain how such a perspective can reveal the depth and range of the arrival theme of the masterpiece.The first chapter focuses on the evolution of identity concept and the identity crisis in the post-colonial world. An inherited Diaspora, Naipaul is destined to suffer the loss of identity as an exile and the struggle to locate his identity in one place or one culture. Furthermore, his denial against his former colonial identity also brings about his self-imposed exile from the margin to the center and the further endeavor of locating his identity in the world.In the second chapter, the recursive journeys recorded in the novel will be deliberately discussed. Naipaul started his journey from the margin to the center due to the disillusionment at the distorted West Indian colonial education. However, time and again, he came to realize that he had to take more journeys since he found that no matter what place and culture he was in, he was stuck in the"double exteriority"situation, endured the fragmentation of self and the split of man and writer.The third chapter will provide the readers the key to the problem of Naipaul's identification. After stepping out of his own fantasy about England as an ex-colonial, Naipaul successfully healed the old wound and fulfilled the synthesis of man and writer, which contributes to the positive acceptance of a hybrid identity. In The Enigma of Arrival, after years of exile suffering, Naipaul's perspective towards the"Other"and the world has changed. And in this point of view, he realized that his fantasy was finally reconciled with the reality; meanwhile, by reflecting different characters in this autobiographical novel, he achieved the final reconciliation of different aspects of his identity and enjoyed a peaceful and tranquil mind of life and writing after the recursive journeys.The conclusion offers a brief summary of the major arguments of the thesis and briefly expounds how a sense of hybrid culture is crucial for the identification of the immigrants.