The Turn Of Naipaul’s Medium-Term Writing

Naipaul is a typical writer in post-colonial literature,all of whose works can be seen as the footnotes of his own life experience.His writing can be divided into three stages.The early stage is to write the other’s escape,to the other’s escape to the home to reflect themselves.The mid-term stage is when he established his own unique writing characteristics,his writing style and emotion are in deliberate contrast with the early works,also his narrative and emotional expression are more personal.The late stage is like the integration of the early and mid-term stages,which returns to the fictional narrative of the other,though obviously autobiographical.The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World are two novels that best reflect Naipaul’s mid-term writing characteristics.Chapter one of this paper tries to sort out the background of Naipaul’s mid-term writing.Naipaul has never stopped pursuing self-identity throughout his writing career.In the self-division of western culture,Trinidad culture and Indian culture,Naipaul’ s ideological contradictions contributed to the burst of his observation and imagination.Naipaul traveled back to the colony and wrote down many travel notes in his early age,which predicted his change in writing.He had been thinking about more suitable narrative form for his changing view of the world.The image of the other person no longer meets Naipaul’ s needs for self-construction,and he can not wait to set up a solid post-colonial culture model.Chapter two makes concrete analysis of the The Enigma of Arrival,focusing on its personal lyrical tendencies,exploring Naipaul’ s turns in his mid-term writing from the writing characteristics and the emotional expression of the colony.The Enigma of Arrival is Naipaul’s poem free of rationality bondage,in which he anatomizes his own "British nature" and emotion of Trinidad’s home.Repeated narrative and the emotional experience from sense of loss to reconciliation endow the novel with romantic style of lyricism.The double narrative space between sealed British manor and Trinidad reflects the historical connection between the sovereign and the colonies,which contains Naipaul’s memory of his colonial home.Chapter three mainly analyzes Naipaul’s historical consciousness and his ways of reconstruction of history through the close reading of A Way in the World.Naipaul believes that only by deep understanding of local history can one make rational analysis of social status.As a narrative text combining autobiography,history and fiction,A Way in the World embodies Naipaul,s mid-term writing orientation and ideals.It reconstructs the history of the Caribbean and writes the individuals obscured by history,the historical consciousness embodied in which is gradually emerged during Naipaul’ s journey.Thus,Naipaul’ s writing achieves two aspects of change in the mid-term stage.Firstly,the writing characteristics develops a fusion of historical studies,personal autobiography,novels,news and other mixed style,and pursuit of more sophisticated form arrangement in narrative;Secondly,the emotional change towards colonial hometown Trinidad and cultural root India,which means a lot for the construction of himself.