Faculty of Arts

Department of Language, Literature

and Cultural Studies

NAME: TAURAI .O CHINYANGA

LEVEL: 2:2

REG NUMBER: R092064y

MODULE: BAEH 213: CARIBBEAN LITERATURE

LECTURER: DR T. MHITI

ASSIGNMENT QUESTION: V.S Naipaul’s stories in Miguel Street are

linked by the similar destiny of seemingly inevitable disillusionment.” Discuss the
veracity of this assertion by making reference to three stories in Miguel Street.
A theme is a principal idea or fundamental meaning of a literary piece. It differs from

the subject of a piece in that, the subject, is the topic on which the author has chosen

to write, while a theme is an expression about that topic. Themes can be of either

kind, major or minor. A major theme is an idea that the author returns to again and

again as it becomes what the plot of the story revolves around. A minor theme on the

other hand appears from time to time but is not the focus of the story.

The novel contains a number of characters with great ambitions that never went

anywhere and are only left to be recorded in books. The novel is written in the first

person, with each character getting its own episode. The narrator’s experiences are

also woven in between, except for the last two chapters where the protagonist is the

narrator himself.

Miguel street highlights the brutal nature of slavery and colonial system and their

dehumanizing aspects are legacies that the west indian societies have to contend with

the lack of a self sustaining identity and rootedness gives rise to impermanence of

characters in Miguel street. Colonial society is caught up in the miasma of post

slavery ethics.

According to Joshi (1994) Naipaul is intrigued by the absurdity of man’s situation and

finileness of his existence. His fiction exudes a bleak pessimistic vision of wastelands,

emptiness and meaninglessness and meaninging; lessness despair and ennui its lost;

lonely and drifiting characters and the absence in his novel of positive relationships

reflect his belief that each man is essentially alone and must find fhis own way in a

world without meaning.

The book commences with the story of Bogart, a man who is nicknamed after the

famous actor Humphrey Bogart, who seeks to escape the ‘little room’ in which he

spends his days on Miguel Street playing Patience, which was what they called him

before calling him Bogart. He is a man without an identity, without a name, without a

place in the world which is shown as evident when he temporarily leaves Miguel

Street and it was as if “he had never come to Miguel Street” (p. 3). His intermittent

arrivals and disappearances from the street reveal his attempts to put off a static nature

and adopt an escapist nature in response to the superfluous life he is living. His whole

life on Miguel Street is a charade, but to him it becomes real.

He assumes the persona of the actor and moves towards Americanization – American

accent, chewing of gum, how he smoked – in an attempt to find the real world. His

escape can also be seen in light of the fact that he could not produce a child with his

Tunapuna wife and he goes elsewhere and impregnates another woman to prove his

virility. His leaving this woman though shows that escapism transcends all common

sense and law, because regardless of the fact that he now father’s a child and that he is

being charged with bigamy, Bogart still feels compelled to escape from what is.

Naipaul through his character this disillusionment and impotency Bogart is a failure

and disappointment is the result of all of his endeveours.

Escapism is a form disillusionment the need to find another avenue to block social,

political and economic problems this also is a failure because in trying to escape it

leads to more disappointment.

His atttempt ends up in disappointment The whole novel is narrated by an unnamed

fatherless boy who himself is a part of a group of kids on Miguel Street. He uses a

humorous and satirist tone to describe the people who make up Miguel Street. The

whole novel is divided into seventeen episodes and each episode describes the life and

its situations targeting one character at a time.

Another episode describes the character of Popo in The Thing Without a Name. Popo

called himself a carpenter and is always working on a thing without a name. As per

his image in the street he never finishes making anything despite of keeping himself

busy in his work all the time. Popo was a married, contented man then, till his wife

left him. Thereafter Popo left the street in search of his wife. When he returned he was

not the same man. A negative change could be seen in him, just like Bogart in the

previous episode. His wife Emelda returned after a span of time and their life became

normal once again, till one day a newspaper headlines said ‘Calypso Carpenter

Jailed’. He was imprisoned for stealing new furniture. When he returned from the jail,

he was a better man. From then he had started working seriously. Thus he set himself

free from all the illusions of life and rather than wasting time in great ambitions which

have no direction, he started earning his life seriously.

Popo epitimizes the notion of dissappointment a shame of a man who went about

advertising a job he is not capable of doing his wife leaves him and he is left in a

desperate situation every venture he takes up in failure. The mimicry that the

characters potray leads to disaappointment the characters fail dismally in an attempt to

mirror foreign attributes in the case of Popo with capentry as well as B. Woodsworth

the next character.

In another important episode B. Wordsworth calls himself a poet. He aspires to be a

poet but society does not offer him a place and neither does he posses the intelligence

and imaginative qualities desirable in a poet. He lets his garden grow into a parody of

the Garden of Eden. He has only mango and plum trees one or two of each type. He

gazes at bees and ants and he hopes to write a great poem that should take about

twenty seven years to write. But all he has written is ‘The past is deep’ He is

essentially a derelict man in a derelict place despite his charming outside appearance.

He declared to the narrator that he was in the process of writing the world’s greatest

poem, but never wrote past the first line. The narrator spent a great time with

B.Wordsworth, without letting his mother know about his regular visits to the poet’s

house. When B.Wordsworth got sick he disclosed to the narrator that he was not

writing any great poem. At last it was disclosed that he lived in illusion but on the

death bed he set himself free from all the illusions.

B Woodworths’s full name is Black Woodsworth and he is brother of White

Wordworth alluding to William Wordsworth belonging to the British romantic era he

is also a character who is micking white wordsworth hoping to be a great poet and

fails dismally leading to disappointment and disillusionment. His dreams not realised

and deferred no achievement just disappointment.

Slavery is deeply etched in the lives of the characters in MIguel street it dwarfs the

soul. B wordworth the most pathetic man demonstrates the anguish attendant upon the

deferment of dreams culminating to disappoinment and disillusionment.

Misfortune and defeat constitute the essential examination if one has to settle among

the people of Miguel Street. The street is so callous and hostile to progress and change

the individual is resigned to conformity every avenue leads up to disappointment. The

characters are sad comedians. The inhabitants of Miguel Street try to recreate

themselves but failure attends every such effort.

The people are craving for possessions or pursuits to be identified by but these too

prove empty and fraudulent. It is a static society doomed to obscrurity. Noone is

exempt from defeat or failure. It is a prison from which people try to escape fleeing to

the metropolitan.

In conclusion V.S. Naipaul achieves unparalled in his brutal frankness and undaunted

persistence in the way he describes the horrors of victimisation his depiction of the

maiming nature of colonial society and his inadvertent demonstration that there is no

single way of responding to the complexity of colonial experience is illuminating. The

seemingly barren stories of Miguel Street ends with alienation and disillusionment.

The narrator makes us aware of a tragic sense which is tinted with a lingering

nostalgia for the child’s innocence.

REFERENCE LIST

Bhabha, Homi K. Location of Culture, Routledge: London, 2004. Print.

Cudjoe, S. R. V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1988.Print.

Josh C.B. (1994) V.S. Naipaul The Voice of Exile New Delhi Sterling publishers

Naipaul, V. S. Miguel Street. 1959. New York: Heinemann, 2000. Prin