On The Culture Identity Of The Mimic Men In V.S.Naipaul’s Fiction

V.S.Naipaul once said in his novel The Mimic Men that, the mimic men, to a certain degree, were in fact the life pattern of the colonial, especially of the intellectuals. Therefore, mimic and the mimic men have been the central focus of attention throughout Naipaul’s entire fiction and non-fiction writings. From his first novel Miguel Street to the more recently novel Magic Seeds,the characters of the mimic man ranging from marginal man of the ex-colony,politicians who worked for the colonial government, to the wandering intellectuals back from the travel to the suzcrian country. The mimic men, whom Naipaul called fake men for being in a mimicking state, refer to people who pretend to be, or play the role of others, lacking or hiding a self-consciousness, the essence of whom is actually self-division, a confusion of cultural identity. And that is the shared dilemma of cultural identity of the ex-colony people living in a post-colonial age.Growing up as an Indian in Trinidad, Naipaul, ambitious of being a writer, in his youth went to England to study and search for dreams, and he himself had went through the period of mimicking in developing his own cultural identity. Building on his cultural experience, Naipaul have created a number of ex-colonial mimic men who lived in a postcolonial environment in which the western discourse dominated,the process of self-repression, concealing, to searching, and self-expression, reproduce the course of ex-colony people seeking for self-identity.The mimic men being trapped in mimicry, is the sigh of self-division and lost-identity; the mimic men surpass the mimicry, is the process of self-reconstruction, and achieving an unified identity.Stuart Hall regarded the cultural identity of postcolonial subject as a kind of narration of cultural identity, thus writing with a self-narrative possessed a sense of revealing the true self and obtaining a unified identity. The mimic men of Naipaul’s novels, through the exact pathway, gained a unified identity, and transcended the mimicking stage. The process of the mimic men realizing their unified self, is at the same time the process of constantly thinking of their own historical and present condition, and at last finding harmony with it. The mimic men thus receive a sense of a "Second Arrivial", starting to see their own experience as being a part of the progress of the whole British empire. But this identification is always of distance, the feeling of strangeness, anxiety and out of place does not fade away. As for their relationship with the home country, with their identifying with the British, the connection with the home country grows thinner and thinner, eventually the umbilical cord is completely cut off, therefrom home only exists in imagination, the mimic men become inner homeless drifters.This essay employs the means of close-reading, takes Miguel Street,The Mystic Masseur,The Mimic Men,The Enigma of Arrival,Half a Life,Magic Seeds as main texts, analyzes the aforementioned process, thereby examines the observaton method and political feelings in Naipaul’s writing.