A Solitary Journey In Exile

V.S. Naipaul is a prestigious postcolonial writer. In2001, he was awarded NobelPrize for Literature, and in the same year, Half a Life, which is an autobiographicalnovel of Naipaul, came out. Like most of his works, this novel deals with the usualthemes that are typical in Naipaul’s writings, including post-colonialism and identityissues. In Half a Life, Naipaul presents us with the protagonist Willie’s diasporicjourney in quest of identities, revealing the universal psychological predicament ofpeople in postcolonial and colonial countries searching for identity and home.Through the use of the neo-psychological theories of Karen Horney, this thesis offersa systematic interpretation of Willie’s formation of neurosis. Caught up in thebetweenness of two cultures, one Indian mother culture and the other borrowedwestern culture, Willie failed to relate to any culture and finally ended up placelessand rootless. And in psychological dimension, his anxieties for identity escalated intoirresolvable conflicts that permeated his whole character, making neurosis evident inhim. The novel concludes that Willie’s neurosis started from familial influences, butrooted in the complex and conflicting social cultural environments.