The Eihanof Arirval

The Enigma of Arrival was written by V. S. Naipaul, who is one of the “threepredominant British migrant writers”. Being an Indian descendant with complexcultural background and the long time traveling experience forming his specialwriting style, V.S. Naipaul is one of the most attracting immigrant and post-colonialwriters in English literature. Therefore, the novel won him a wide attention fromliterature field. In V. S. Naipaul’s work, we could not only find the profundity ofthemes but also the employment of a variety of narrative techniques.V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in2001and TheEnigma of Arrival is one of the most famous representatives. This novel has obtainedwide and special attention from literary critics both at home and abroad. However,there are simply a few comments and researches being done from the perspective ofnarratology. Therefore, the thesis attempts to analyze the text with the application ofFrench narratologist Genette’s narrative theories, and then probe into the relationshipbetween narrative features and the theme of the novel. In other words, the thesisanalyzes the application of narrative techniques through picking some typicalexamples from the text. By so doing, it aims to explore the theme of arrival of thenovel under discussion.This thesis consists of five parts in all. The introduction will present some basicinformation about Naipaul and his works, the literature review of The Enigma ofArrival, the theoretical framework and the layout of this thesis. The first chapter willmake an analysis of narrative time, mainly about order, duration and frequencymanifested from the text. Through this non-linear narration, the narrator has achievedan epiphany of arrival from periphery to the centre. The second chapter will discussthe aspects of narrative focalizations in the novel. This part mainly analyzes the textfrom the types of focalization, alternation of focalization and the properties offocalization, and therefore, it intends to draw a conclusion that the narrator has arrived at a synthesis from traveler to writer. The third chapter is devoted toanalyzing various types of narrative discourses. It intends to argue that the diegeticdiscourse in terms of narrator’s own discourse and indirect speech as well as itsopposition of mimetic discourse in terms of direct speech and interior monologue ofcharacter show the authorial ideologies from the text. On the basis of summarizingthe whole dissertation, the concluding part will highlight the theme of the novel. Inother words, the narrator’s whole life-pursuit arrival could be concluded as threesorts of arrival: the epiphany of spatial arrival, which means the narrator’s arrivalfrom the periphery to the metropolis; the epiphany of psychological arrival, whichrefers to his arrival at a world of peace and calm; and the last sort is the epiphany ofideological arrival, that is, he has ultimately achieved a compromise towards hishybrid identity.