A Postcolonial Study Of Identity In The Mimic Men

V. S. Naipaul, winner of the Noble Prize for Literature in2001, is a world famous writer in literature. His ancestral land is India; he was born in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, while he settles in England. The study on Naipaul’s cultural identity is a shining point in the postcolonial field. Naipaul’s works have attracted people’s keen attention and have also resulted in a continuous debate on his identity. Some people criticize that he sings highly for Western civilization and that he is a traitor of the Third World; but some people praise that he has revealed calmly and objectively the Third World’s reality and has pushed people to confront and manage to solve the Third World’s problem. He is always haunted by his identity problem. Through the characters’experiences in his work, Naipaul reflects himself in the reality and expresses his idea on his identity problem. Based on a close reading of Naipaul’s major work The Mimic Men, under the guidance of postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory, this thesis thoroughly analyzes the main characters’identity confusion, identity seeking, identity disillusion and awakening in the end and explores those of Naipaul’s in reality.At the end of this thesis, conclusions are drawn in the following:Firstly, blindly mimicry is not the way out to solve identity problem, while writing is a possible way. Naipaul no longer blindly mimics the West, nor does he blindly hybridize, but he actively constructs a cultural identity in the third space, which is consistent with his identity writing. Secondly, what Naipaul pursuits is the identity of a world writer, who writes for the whole world. Thirdly, writing should be creative and should promote the communication of different cultures between the First World and the Third World. One of the creating points of this thesis is that it studies Naipaul’s identity seeking from a postcolonial perspective.