LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Failures and Disillusionment in
Naipaul's Miguel Street

Shehla Ali, M.A.

Abstract

This article intends to give a clear view of Naipaul's protagonist, with special consideration to his first piece of work Miguel Street. It also describes the life of characters and its situations, which transform their life completely. A few episodes are used to describe the failures and disillusionment of Naipaul's protagonist.

Naipaul's First Written Work

The noble laureate V.S. Naipaul started his career as a freelance writer with his first written work of fiction Miguel Street in the year 1959. Miguel Street is a semi-autobiographical novel set in wartime Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Naipaul wrote this novel while he was employed in the BBC. Miguel Street won the 1961 Somerset Maugham Award.

As Trinidad is V.S. Naipaul's childhood home, he minutely observed its tradition and culture. The readers are introduced to a galaxy of characters with different professions and features. They love to live in illusions and meet failures at every stage of their life.

The Structure of Miguel Street

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.

This approach of picking up one character at a time made this work easy to understand. 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.

In Trinidad, every small issue turned out to be a big event for the people. The novel is also about the outside influences on the narrator which lead him to leave his home in order to make something of himself.

Bogart

The novel opens with an episode of Bogart, named after the name of the protagonist in the story. Bogart lived in Port of Spain and pretended to be a tailor, who never stitched a single suit. Bogart was looked upon as the most bored man in the street, but still he managed to make friends.

According to the narrator, he was the most popular figure in the street. He lived a peaceful life till he suddenly vanished one day. For the street people, he had always been a man of mystery.

After a long interval he returned to the street and to the amazement of Miguel Street, he seemed to be completely transformed. He had started drinking and talking a lot, which he never used to do before. He got a job on a ship and had gone to British Guiana, where he started smuggling things. He was going on well with his illegal business, when the police arrested him. Thereafter he returned to the street and became the most feared and awful man.

Bogart disappeared the third time and finally when he appeared, he got arrested by Sergent Charles, in charge of bigamy. Thus Bogart's great ambitions ruined his life.

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Ergativity in Pahari Language | The Robustness of Free Reading in Second and Foreign Language Education | Conversational Cloze as a Measure of Ability in English in Indian Schools | Teaching the Intangibles - The Role of the English Teacher | Failures and Disillusionment in Naipaul's Miguel Street | Issues and Problems in Ph.D. in English - Degree Quality Assurance in Pakistan | Socio-Linguistic Constraints of Code Switching in Hindi-English-Kannada Multilinguals | Nature of Perception according to Gautama | The Quintessence of Sports Psychology and Language | Some Characteristics of Tamil Jokes | Lexical Opposites in Tamil | The Fire and the Rain - Deriving Meaning for Modern Life from Myths | Realilty and Challenges for Tamil in a Multilingual Environment - Tamil in Malaysia: An Essay in Tamil | Teaching and Learning a Classical-Modern Language - Some Thoughts Relating to Tamil | HOME PAGE of December 2009 Issue | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR