“V.S. Naipaul is as much concerned as any other West Indian writer, with issues of aboriginal error, the question of the past and its legacy of crime, guilt and dereliction, and the near impossible ordeal of restructuring and rebuilding what he has termed these “half-made”, “haphazard” “crazy” societies, places which though termed new he regards as having already exhausted their possibilities.

“Naipaul’s Africa of “In a Free State” and “A Bend in the River” bleeds cyclically with the effort of reconciling the bush, a place that is “not yet part of the present” [Bend, 9] with such postmodern civilization as is characterized on the one hand by the prefabricated Big Burger joint and on the other by the advanced machinery of mass murder…”

“When Salim, seeking a new life, first arrives at the unmanned town at bend in the river after a drive “from the east coast right through to the center” his first reaction as he encounters the equatorial forest is:But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can’t be a new life at the end of this. [Bend 4]

‘Confession’ in Naipaul has been concerned with the dilemma of constructing identities, defining commitment to or negotiating escape from these dreadful places where green beginnings are strangely identical with dead-ends. Such confession has been both direct – as in his interviews, essays, travelogues and other non-fiction – and indirect as in his fiction, where the protagonists function as complex and manipulable masks for their creator: Naipaul the author…”

“This essay will pursue a chronological pathway through Naipaul’s writings from the 1960’s to the late 1970’s, when the issues of confession were most clearly manifest in his work. These issues included that of the writer’s responsibility to the country of his origin; the necessity for escape and exile and the consequent ordeal of alienation; the quest for personal independence and the fortitude necessary for existence supported by the props of nation, ideology or easily accessible guidelines; the impossibility of illumination in an ever-darkening private and public landscape; the irony of intervention and committed action in situations that seem to be historically predetermined to end in disaster…”

“Naipaul from the very start perceived his haphazard society as being peopled by survivalists, tricksters, picaroons and a whole theatre of amoral hustlers living by the grace of their wits. The trickster with his ethic of survival by any means necessary is a machiavellian character who cannot afford to listen to the cry of conscience or the remorse central to confession. Naipaul’s primary assumption, stated in The Middle Passage and elsewhere, was that Trinidad society lacked moral and spiritual values, order, solidity or firmly lived ideals. Thus Naipaul’s rogues, frauds and self-propelling mediocrities are genuinely unaware of error as they pragmatically measure their gains and losses on the compelling and chaotic stage of life. Characters such as Ganesh or Harbans quite naturally shun the depths of self into which confessional self-assessment would lead them. Like their society, they lack a moral center and thus greet their success with self-congratulation, rather than the self-recrimination of the confessant…”

“A Christmas Story” like “One Out of Many” or “Tell Me Who To Kill” almost one decade later, raises certain pertinent questions such as: Where is the author located with respect to Choonilal’s self-contempt? Dose part of Naipaul, the Indo-Saxon element in him partake of the self-contempt that he, Ramsumair/G Ramsey Muir as masks holds up to ironic scrutiny and laughter? Is he employing the narrator to articulate and interrogate his own cultural and aesthetic choice as a self-confessed refugee from what he has termed his barbarous background towards the sterilized sanity of M’Laty’s timeworn boarding house? Or does he simply present Choonilal as an extreme example of what has happened throughout the New World since Columbus’s arrival, namely: cultural erasure, the aesthetic rejection of ancestral names, languages and customs; the eventually willing choice of the more acceptable culture of the ruling class as superior; the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism’s binaries of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’?

“Half of the charm of the confessional mode as here employed by Naipaul is that we can only speculate about the answers to these questions. Choonilal’s confession reveals guilt and shame, but for the wrong reasons. Naïve in the midst of his laboriously acquired education, he is incapable of questioning his choice of cultures. Yet he envies his successful Hindu cousin, a relatively uneducated but highly practical businessman, and twice admits his nostalgia for the family life and ethnic lifestyle from which he has chosen to isolate himself. His self-exposure via confession reveals a pettiness of spirit that he deceives himself is magnanimity, a sense of shame at only his own failure, and an anguished recognition that every apparent gain is accompanied by a correspondent loss: the Mohun Biswas epiphany...”

“A Flag on the Island” is less obviously confessional than “A Christmas Story” yet it does represent a distinctive stage in Naipaul’s experimentation with the confessional mode, the anti-hero, and the marginalized nauseated melancholic malcontent whose grey voice has pervaded confessional fiction from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground to Camus’s The Fall, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Denis Williams’s Other Leopards, John Stewarts’ Last Cool Days or Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man and Heozog. A Flag on the Island is narrated by Frank a former marine who during World War II used to be stationed on the American Base that was as the time planted on Chaguaramas Bay, Trinidad. As in Guerillas a few years later, Naipaul never gives Frank’s island a name; his aim being, perhaps, to indicate the facelessness, the unformed features and the indistinctness of the island’s emerging Post-Independence identity.

“Frank, whose name suggests honesty, is in fact a morally neutered yet judgmental anti-hero. During the War he ran a ‘racket’ in which he supplied a small local clientele with items ranging from canned foods to uniforms smuggled out of the American Base. His greatest success is in the theft of a truck which, somehow, the filthy-rich Americans never miss. They have so many more like that truck. This story, I should warn you, is subtitled “A Fantasy.”

“In return for the access he provides to all of this largesse, Frank is granted a privileged place in the city’s seedy, semi-rustic underworld, where he has his choice of wahbeens and the best of the city’s rankly flowering nightlife. The craftiest and most resourceful of the locals grow with Frank’s sponsorship, expanding their business from quaint folksiness to plastic petty bourgeois fakery and false sophistication. Frank himself probably grows rich, though he never tells us this, as he modestly excludes himself from his narrative.

“The time present of Frank’s story is the early sixties, when Frank returns to the island on a tourist ship. It is about sixteen years since he left at the end of the War. The country has become independent and the changes initiated by Frank and the ten thousand other Americans during the War have made the country into the sort of “crazy tourist place” that Naipaul constantly deplored during the sixties, ceasing only when the weight of years made him tired. Frank serves as a mask behind which Naipaul condemns neo-colonial Trinidad for what he sees as a loss in autonomy, due to a persistent self-contempt, a failure to cherish genuine aspects of the past, and a consequent surrender to Americanization and modernity. Frank narrates as judge, not as penitent. He never makes the connection between the folksy paradise that he helped change, and the fallen and unreal city that he rediscovers on his return.

“Frank shares with the post-Dostoevskian confessant a recoil from the emptiness and mediocrity of the fabricated city. Naipaul signals this through one of his most repeated tropes: the association of eating with nausea. Trying to decide whether to remain on board in the antiseptic cabin of the tourist ship or to indulge in the nostalgia of a return to old familiar pleasure-spots, Frank anticipates the pleasure of consuming plates of local oysters, but then remembers that oysters also used to make him nauseous. When Frank goes ashore he does consume a plate of one hundred oysters and views the city through the ensuing nausea and delirium.

“Like Sartre’s Roquentin, Dennis Williams’s Lionel Froad of Other Leopards or Naipaul’s Kripalsingh of The Mimic Men, Frank experiences a nausea that is simultaneously physical and existential. He is repelled by what seems most to attract him. The act of eating a pleasurable pastime in most writers, always seems to produce shudder of recoil in the Naipaul protagonist. Sometimes, as in A Bend in the River or An Area of Darkness where the protagonist is Naipaul himself, food and faeces are presented as the twinned metaphors not only of life in those ancestral places, but of the protagonist’s depth response, his attraction to and repulsion by existence itself. Nausea, I think, is Naipaul’s peculiar way of signaling his simultaneous relish for and recoil from the substance of life. Physical nausea both masks and signals existential recoil.

“This ambivalence of attraction and recoil, of attraction to what the individual knows will repel him, might be seen in Kripalsingh’s anticipates relish of the adventure of hunting (his word) prostitutes, which is always contradicted by his self-loathing and the violation he feels during and after performance of what he disdainfully terms “the act required.” [MM 30] It is also visible in the attraction that both Naipaul the author and many of his creatures feel towards countries, cultures, landscapes and situations that repel them: situations such as the recurrent image of a festering, stinking, perpetually smoking rubbish-heap in Guerillas; a symbol of Dante’s inferno of concentric circles. The image is indulged in, relished almost, long after the horror it signifies has been communicated to the reader…”

“Kripalsingh begins his memoirs after living for eighteen months in “the anaesthetizing order of life in this hotel” (291) until “despair and emptiness had burnt themselves out.” Kripal’s beginning as an Absurd confessional writer involves a recognition of “the formlessness of my experiences and their irrelevance to the setting in which I proposed to recount them.” (292). Writing, this encounter with and attempt to impose order and pattern on formlessness, commences with a feeling of nausea. Kripal recalls that in “the faded light” of “late afternoon” “my stomach, head and eyes united in this single sensation of nausea and deadness. Memory grows out of this flat grey deadness.

“It is how it happens with Dostoevsky’s absurd confessional narrator who begins his narration with the warning that: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.” [Notes, 3] Kripalsingh shares in this sickness and resembles the Underground Man is several particulars. He is petty bourgeois, forty years old, and outsider, who resides on the outskirts of a great city: London in the case of Kripal, St Petersburgh in the case of Dostoevsky’s confessant. Both men exist on small precarious incomes; both have withdrawn from active engagement in life; both are full of overweening pride and its opposite, a crippling sense of inferiority. Both live within their heads, relish ugliness, are given to fantasy, self-exposure and self-deception. Kripal confesses to flippancy but is frequently overwhelmed by deep melancholy; the Underground Man speaks of his strange sense of humour as “grinning between clenched teeth.”

“Both anti-heroes have been oddities at school, weaklings aware at all times of their nonentity. The process of education increases their alienation. Their friendships with schoolmates are painful and lack candour. If the Underground Man develops a kind of universal scorn, Kripalsingh develops nausea and disgust which begins as self-disgust and shame for his eccentric, depressed father. Both fear intimacy, and locked up in their narcissistic selves, both are incapable of the commitment and self-surrender that love demands. Both cherish isolation, but also feel the need to confess, perhaps to themselves, perhaps to an imaginary but hoped-for audience of confessors and judges. Yet neither can really endure judgment and what they seek through confession, while not quite absolution, is an unburdening and a release which Kripal calls “the final emptiness…”