On Naipaul's Arrivals In The Enigma Of Arrival

V. S. Naipaul is a noted author of the English language in the world today. He is a deep thinker on history, society and nature with his extrodinary rich life experience and cutural heritage. Also, he is a writer without a heritage to hold sway over him. This thesis focuses on The Enigma of Arrival, which won for Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.Written in 1987, The Enigma of Arrival is the only book representing Naipaul's own life and literary thoughts when he had stayed in Britain for more than 30 years and published some influential books. With the first-person narration, it expresses Naipaul's discoveries and changing views about life in Britain. Looking back on his very beginning in Britain as a college student, Naipaul searchs for the innate power that enables him to arrive in Britain in terms of geograpgy and culture. And he finds out that Britain, though strange to him before, is his ultimate home for his writing and spiritual life. It is Britain that affords him a solid material and spiritual foundation. In this thesis, Naipaul's arrival is analyzed in terms of postcolonialism and the conclusion is that this arrival means Naipaul's getting his hybrid cultural identity. Thus the enigma of arrival is the enigma of his getting a hybrid cultural identity. This thesis tries to analyse his getting hybrid cultural identity, i.e. arrival, in the following parts.This thesis includes five parts. Part 1 is a brief introduction of Naipaul and his works, including a review of the related literature about the researches on his works both at home and abroad. Part 2 is an analysis of Naipaul's seeking for arrival from the sociological and psychological perspectives in which the theory of postcolonialism is applied as well as the concept of"identity". Part 3 focuses on the analysis of the whole structure of the novel and the painting of"The Enigma of Arrival", mainly with the help of New Criticism. The analysis also shows that"arrival"is embodied in the images that Naipaul uses in the novel: Jack and his garden. They, in some way, represent the ideal existence for human beings. Part 4 is an analysis of Naipaul's arrival as a writer and man, and this means Naipaul's getting his hybrid cultural identity. Part 5 is a brief summary of the thesis.The originality of this thesis lies in the following factors: 1. It studies a fairly new writer to the Chinese readers. 2. It combines postcolonialism and New Criticism in the analysis of a literary work so as to understand the writer as he really is.