The Third Space In Naipaul’s A Bend In The River: From Dream To Disillusion

V.S.Naipaul is one of the most famous writers of the postcolonial literature.His complex background and personal experience made him in the mixed zone of the Eastern and Western cultures.The special cultural background and personal experience shape the hybrid identity of Naipaul,which creates the special cultural perspective and the sensitive insight of Naipaul.Accordingly,most of Naipaul’s works have always been concerned about the social status and living conditions of the post-colonized people.The novel A Bend in the River published in 1979 is one of Naipaul’s masterpieces.This novel contains a lot of Naipaul’s art thought and his attitude toward post-colonial society and culture,and therefore it is worth careful study.By applying Homi K.Bhabha’s Third Space theory,this thesis mainly explores how Naipaul conceives to create the Third Space through his work A Bend in the River,and eventually,how he allegorically declares the failure of this attempt.The thesis also analyzes the inevitability of the failure.Firstly,this thesis analyzes how Naipaul constructs the Third Space.In this part,the features of Third Space which Naipaul plans to establish in A Bend in the River was illuminated,and the features which contained temporal and spatial feature(historical dimension),culture and cultural identity feature(cultural dimension)are exactly consistent with the features of Bhabha’s Third Space,thus proving the origin of Naipaul’s Third Space theory.If Bhabha is the creator of this theory,Naipaul could be seen as the utopian practitioner of this theory.This part also clarifies the different ways Naipaul attempts to create the Third Space employing the characters’ attitudes toward the construction of the post-colonial river town in the novel.Secondly,the thesis also explores the main reasons of the Naipaul’s Third Space’s disillusion.It includes the specificity of temporal and spatial feature,ambiguity of cultural identity,and the inevitable cultural conflict.Finally,according to the analysis of A Bend in the River,this thesis finds that it is so difficult to achieve the meditation of different cultures.In his novel,Naipaul implies that it’s hard to achieve a harmonious combination of overpowering western culture and the local culture of the independent post-colonial society,thus,the sure cultural conflicts lead to the disillusion of Naipaul’s Third Space.With Bhabha’s theory,Naipaul dreams of constructing the Third Space in his own literary world.However,he discovers that the concept of Bhabha’s Third Space is only a Utopian assumption which cannot easily come true in the real world.So,he announces this idea by way of the tragic ending of the novel.