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The Graduate English Journal of Hunter College
Small Redemptions: Ralph Singh's Journey
Through Disorder in The Mimic Men
By Geronimo Madrid
By Geronimo Madrid
As the narrator of V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh shows himself to be one of the most vividly drawn anti-heroes in Caribbean literature. He is a hapless dreamer, a narcissistic yet self-loathing Caribbean man, a racist, and a womanizer who displays cruelty, disdain and disinterest more than passion. Politically, he is also a failure, having helped found and run a quasi-socialist movement that, in the end, fails to bring about meaningful reform for its disenfranchised base. Rather, his political party helps foment deadly race riots in his native Isabella. In the book's fictional world, our source for all this information is of course Singh himself, who in his middle age, is writing a memoir. The memoir itself is brutally frank, painting an unflattering picture of both Singh and his native island, Isabella. Naipaul portrays Isabella—an obvious stand-in for recently de-colonized West Indian nations such as the author's native Trinidad—as a social quagmire of class and race divisions, petty elites and self-serving insipid politicians. In so doing, Naipaul is displaying his famous willingness—or even eagerness—to say things that are unsavory or unpopular. In the early 1960s, at the dawn of the postcolonial era, Naipaul is already airing the Caribbean's dirty laundry and forecasting a gloomy future for the region's newly liberated countries (even as its people are still nursing the hangovers from their newfound independence). For this reason, many critics have focused on the undeniable pessimism that informs The Mimic Men. For example, in Writers and Their Work: V.S. Naipaul, Michael Thorpe interprets Singh's story as an "inverted tragedy" (26)—the tale of a small life rendered even smaller by its bearer's large faults. Meanwhile, in an article entitled, "The Mimic Men as a Study of Corruption," Peter Nazareth comes to a wider-ranging conclusion about Naipaul's novel: "A reading of The Mimic Men gives rise to the question whether Naipaul has such a narrow vision of life that he can only see the worst in humanity or whether the West Indian society he writes about is so degraded that nothing can be expected of it (143). As justified as these critics' viewpoints are regarding The Mimic Men, there persists a story of personal redemption buried deep and cryptically in this novel's pages. Singh's redemption is not of the grand world-saving variety. Rather the change occurs in the narrator's personal sphere.1 While this change does not lead him to any sort of solidarity with his fellow Isabellans or postcolonials, it does allow Singh to become a more compassionate human being. And importantly, Singh achieves new levels of compassion when, thanks to the process of writing his memoirs, he arrives at new levels of self-awareness. Naturally, before arriving at and dissecting the mechanics of how Singh changes, it would be instructive to first understand his problems.
An obvious starting point would be this book's title: The Mimic Men. On one level, of course, a mimic man is one who literally copies the actions and mannerisms of others, as Singh does. About his Jewish landlord, Mr. Shylock, Singh writes, "He had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear and inclining his head to listen. I thought the gesture was attractive; I copied it" (Naipaul 1). But for Naipaul, the idea of "mimicry" takes on greater psychological and spiritual meaning. As Rob Nixon puts it in London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, Naipaul sees "Third World societies as witlessly derivative and given to grandiloquent, self-delusory, and ultimately self-destructive fantasies" (132). Tellingly, Singh more than fits the description above. He goes out of his way to copy the style of dress, the manner and even the strivings and class obsession of his former British colonizers. "In London… I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship. In fact my income was small… But I let it be known that on my island my family were bottlers of Coca-Cola" (Naipaul 25). And of the busiest phase of his life—when he is building Crippleville and embarking on his ruinous political career—Singh reflects, "[W]hen I was most active and might have given the observer the impression of a man fulfilling his destiny, in that period intensity of emotion was the thing I never achieved" (ibid 38). What Naipaul makes abundantly clear here is that Singh has no true sense of self. His actions arise not from passion or conviction, but from a desire to approximate what the British have done—amass power and wealth, rule and act the part of the indifferent, insouciant elite.
Of course, Singh's mimicry is itself a symptom of deeper issues. His choosing to adopt the character of the dandy points to a self-loathing tinged with racism. In short, he is a Europhile who looks down upon the very Third World country from which he comes. He views Isabella as a hopeless quagmire of un-resolvable race and class conflict. Take for example his description of the villages he and his father pass during a drive: "We drove along narrow rough roads into the valleys of our eastern hills…. [passing] a small community, exceedingly poor, separate even in slave days and inbred to degeneracy, yet still distinguished by an almost superstitious fear and hatred of full-blooded Africans… They permitted no Negroes to settle among them; sometimes they even stoned Negro visitors" (ibid 146). Interestingly, Singh does not look for the root causes of his island's social ills; nor does he exhibit any sympathetic urges toward the disenfranchised and impoverished. And even more remarkably, Singh seems to suffer from a combination of amnesia and nostalgia. He rushes to excuse the brutalities the British committed in the name of empire: slavery, devastating economic exploitation and more. He sees these atrocities as having been necessary for "order", because with the dissolution of the empire, there came unseemly "disorder" (38). He even paints those who demand acknowledgement of and redress for these atrocities in unflattering terms. Singh writes of the postcolonials at his college: "Those halls could be disagreeable, with acrid-accented Africans in stiff white collars and gold-rimmed glasses nursing racial grievance like a virtue and righteously seeking sexual reward from the innocent" (26, my emphasis). Singh's words here paint a most unforgiving stereotype. His words also make it clear that he feels no solidarity with his fellow postcolonials. And his depiction of his fellow postcolonials betray the little faith he has in Third World societies bettering their lot.2 As Peter Nazareth comments, Naipaul puts forth in The Mimic Men and other works a "…cynical view of politics, indeed, and a complete contrast to the faith many African writers had in politics at the beginning of the de-colonization phase. Writers and leaders at this point professed the same ideals, and the writer tended to assume that this was the beginning of a new humanist phase" (137).
Singh's list of dysfunctions does not, of course, end at being a stranger to himself, or in his too-easy surrender to the politics of pessimism. On a personal level, Singh is also deeply flawed, and his relationships with women illuminate these flaws. Even his preference of mate is tinged by racism and self-loathing. From his marriage to Sandra to his preferences for European prostitutes, it is clear that Singh has a fetish for not just any white women, but women of fair-skinned Northern European stock. For this reason, he is unable to take Lieni, a Maltese woman who's obviously infatuated with him, seriously as a potential lover; and he professes little interest in his female "compatriots," "scholarship girls" from the Caribbean studying in London (Naipaul 26). Singh is also emotionally stunted—so much so that in his early sexual life, he proves a callous, insensitive womanizer, unable to deal with women as a whole, but having to compartmentalize them to body parts. He also views emotional and physical intimacy as "violation", as somehow dirty. Singh writes of his early London affairs:
Intimacy: the word holds the horror. I could have stayed forever at a woman's breasts, if they were full and had a hint of a weight that required support. But there was the skin, there was the smell of skin. There were bumps and scratches, there were a dozen little things that could positively enrage me… These scenes in the book-shaped room didn't always end well; they could end in tears, sometimes in anger, a breast grown useless being buttoned up, a door closed on a room that seemed to require instant purification.But then there was my 'character.' I took to retaining trophies… stockings, various small undergarments… Not for the fetichist reasons, I give my word! Though even now I cannot understand my motives" (30).
Here, we see a squeamish Singh, put off by the mere smell of skin and by the "bumps" and blemishes of your average person, and a Singh who sees not complete women but body parts—that "breast grown useless."
Emotionally stunted, a sexual deviant, a self-loathing racist and utterly self-absorbed—these words describe Singh aptly. And it would be tempting to end the interpretation of the novel there: Singh as mouthpiece of Naipaul's infamous pessimism regarding the future of ex-colonies and his rejection of the label "Caribbean writer."3 In other words, it would be tempting to read the novel as the story of how Singh washes his hands of his past and walks toward his existentially liberated future. But a close reading of Singh's transformation will bring to light a deeper level to this narrative. It will show that Singh does, by novel's end, become a more compassionate person. This sea change is most apparent when Singh hires the overweight prostitute during a layover on his way back to Isabella. The scene is touching, even beautiful and in it Singh displays shocking (for him) amounts of empathy and kindness.
She was ghastly, tragic, a figure from hell with a smiling girl's face… Tormented by flesh, she offered knowledge of flesh. Fat, fat, she kept on saying, smiling, tragic; and courtesy and compassion answered for me, No, no. I knew I would never touch; and I feared being touched. Yet I never moved. Flesh, flesh, I thought: how could I disdain? How could I even judge (282)?And after, of the encounter, he says:
But, monstrous, she was in despair… I comforted her; at that moment I was genuine. Fat, fat, she said, lifting her breasts, lifting her belly; and I said, No, no… We talked imperfectly in her language… I was too moved to speak. I watched her re-erect her body for the café, without disdain or judgment; it was all I could offer her. I walked her back to the revolving door (ibid 283, my emphasis).Compare this chivalrous Singh with the underpants-collecting weirdo who, formerly, ended his liaisons with doors slammed shut, harsh words. Compare this Singh with the sadist who, upon asking a French woman to dance, says he does not like to dance and walks off, leaving the woman most definitely hurt and confused (ibid 20). While his old hang-ups regarding the body and intimacy clearly remain, he shows signs of finally shedding some of his calloused hide. He attempts to comfort the overweight prostitute.
How this transformation occurs is, of course, an important question to answer. But first, it must be noted that Singh's movement toward compassion is not a foray into uncharted territory. Rather, it is a return to the somewhat kind, even oversensitive child he once was. (Yes, oversensitive). Naipaul clearly intends the younger Singh to be interpreted as a sentimental or emotionally delicate boy. Take for example his drive with Cecil's Coke bottling-magnate father and the run-in with the loaders on the back of the truck. Initially, Singh writes that he "returned" the scrutiny of the Indian loaders with "the scrutiny of compassion still" (ibid 119, my emphasis). But the ensuing action does not teach Singh that the island's elite should feel sympathy toward the working class. Instead, Cecil's father explodes at the "indignity" of having to ride behind the lowly truck. And Singh writes that the lesson he took away from this was: "A man was only what he saw of himself in others, and an imitation came to me of the chieftainship of the island. This was my political awakening" (ibid 121). And what an embittering realization this must be for a child. On hardscrabble and class-stratified Isabella, of course, such incidents abound. During his visit to his classmate Browne's home, Singh also senses the shame Browne feels about his family's lower-class status: "[Browne's father]… called out 'Bertie!' and sat on the other, sucking at his pipe in old-time Negro fashion and staring at me while he rocked. Bertie! The home name! It was like opening a private letter. I felt Browne wouldn't care for this visit, for the revelation of his father in his flannel vest, which was grimy with rolls of dirt… [Browne] didn't look pleased to see me." (177-8).
Singh is keenly attuned to the divisive workings of class and social hierarchy on his island. And this idea of social stratification—of there being "better" people and "lower" people—is imprinted in him. It at once becomes part of his worldview, and because it is such a distasteful reality, it pushes him toward an emotional withdrawal that leaves him incapable of intimacy and compassion. These changes in the boy Singh are most evident during the extended family's beach holiday and the drownings at sea. This is the pivotal moment when he not only turns away from sympathy but also begins a process of emotional withdrawal that will extend to all aspects of his life—romance, friendship, etceteras:
There in that infernal devouring element people were drowning. The fishermen were begged to go out and save them. The fishermen sat on the roots of coconut trees and mended their nets and stripped lengths of canes for their fishpots… I imagined myself drowning. And in this imagining I became detached; feeling no anger against the fishermen who, as I could hear now, were talking among themselves in their patois; feeling only the feebleness and absurdity of any attempt to rescue those persons, already bodies, hidden in the turquoise water… In my fear, I turned away and walked back to the beach house. So private a fear it was, so private a sensation of the weakness of the flesh… it was shame for the weakness of the flesh that kept me from telling the story to the women…It's clear, then, that Singh was born with the emotional hardware for compassion. For Naipaul, it is Singh's upbringing in Isabella that callouses and corrupts him.4
So it was Cecil who brought the news… Cecil running far from us through the edge of the foaming water, taking high, splashing steps, an odd celebratory figure (131, my emphasis).
Another striking aspect of Singh's childhood is his deep sense of geographic and historic displacement. By this, I mean that Singh is of Indian descent living in the creolized Caribbean, which culturally, holds England and London as ideals. Therefore, he feels disconnected from the history that shapes his ethnicity (Indian history), and he is also disconnected from his present, for he is living in a society that sees itself as less real, less ideal, than distant England. This is most evident in Singh's comments about his schooling on Isabella: "Anything that touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in the classroom: the name of a shop, the name of a street, the name of street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these things to which after the hours of school we were to return… we who took apples to the teacher and wrote essays about visits to temperate farms" (ibid 114-15). The fictitious apple Singh's memory tells him he gave to his teacher speaks volumes about the primacy faraway England holds. The net effect of all this that Singh grows up "out of time" and with no roots. Singh the boy has, in a sense, no forbearers to tell him how to act, and his island-bound father figures, meanwhile, prove lackluster. His uncle, Cecil's father, is a blustery rich person whose sense of self is eggshell thin. And his father becomes a Hindu fanatic and hapless revolutionary. It is this sense of rootlessness that pushes Singh—first as a child and then as an adult—to research and then daydream about belonging to the Indian Aryan horse-borne conquerors of centuries past. In adopting these stories from his ancestral land, he is attempting to find a sense of History5 for himself.
Unfortunately, Singh's knowledge of the Aryans is only book-deep. It is not a history he feels in his bones, for there has been that colonial rift and uprooting—the geographic displacement of his family by their British masters. Hence, Singh's attempt to graft his very being to an Indian Aryan past becomes a vain and vainglorious enterprise. Critic Michael Thorpe writes of Singh's recurrent Aryan daydreams, "This image is linked with his growing social sense in childhood and youth of himself in the unimportant island of Isabella as 'the picturesque Asiatic': it is both a romantic form of the exceptional individual's desire to soar above 'ordinariness' and also akin to the East Indian's harking back to the unknown, idealized India…" (28). Peter Hughes, author of Contemporary Writers: V.S. Naipaul, puts a finer point on it. He writes that Singh's father's rise and fall as cult-leader father does nothing less than "[parody] Singh's fantasies about his Aryan origins among the horsemen of the high Asian plains" (Hughes 71). For Singh, there can be no escape or redemption in a harkening back to India. To do so would be to again render Isabella—his native land—secondary to yet another imaginary locale, just as his British-centric education has done. A latching on to the Indian Aryan past would only encourage Singh's withdrawal into himself and make it more difficult for him to embrace the present.
For much of his life, then, it would be fair to say that Singh—of the disastrous political career, of the foot and breast fetishes, and of the grandiose delusions—is (to put it in today's vernacular) a "mess" and not exactly "relationship material." He could, in fact, probably exhaust an army of psychoanalysts with the breadth and scope of his self-absorption. All that said, it's time now to insist that in the world according to Naipaul, there is hope even for a fellow as mixed-up and damaged as Singh. As stated earlier, by novel's end, this crass, self-obsessed narrator shows that he is indeed capable of acting with sympathy towards others. Specifically, he acts with uncharacteristic kindness toward the overweight prostitute; he even chastises himself, telling himself not to be so judgmental and petty: "Flesh, flesh, I thought: how could I disdain? How could I even judge" (Naipaul 282). What, then, accounts for Singh's small redemption, his small step toward wholeness and feeling?
The answer is at once simple and profound: Singh finds salvation in the act of writing. From the start, Singh expresses his wish to write a grand book of history, on the Indian Aryans. But of course, his "grand" project is put on the back burner while he writes his memoirs. Instead of writing a general history, he writes a personal one. Yet it is through this "lesser" form that Singh finds the key to his small salvation.
One of the keys to Singh's emotional healing is the frankness with which he writes about his life. He does not spare himself or try to paint himself as better than he was. His self-portrait in words is, in fact, downright damning; he comes off as a dysfunctional buffoon. But it is precisely this frankness that enables Singh to get at the root causes of his self-loathing and numbness. For in committing elements of his life story to paper, Singh is able to identify those incidents and influences that made him what he is. He is, in other words, able to gain perspective.
Peggy Nightingale, in her book Journey Through Darkness: The Writing of V.S. Naipaul, touches upon writing's role in Singh's redemption. She writes:
One of the key words of The Mimic Men, 'order,' is used by Singh in a variety of ways reinforcing his perception of a disordered universe. Order may be simply the regularity of life in the hotel, reassuring and anaesthetizing… But another irony operates in that Singh cannot discover the links between events in his life until he writes them out of chronological order; this novel differs from much of Naipaul's work in the complex movement backwards and forwards in time which suggests Singh's internal disorder as he struggles to exorcize his vision of chaos… Singh's method for ordering the parts [of his life] is symbolized by the preparation to eat by the diner he calls Garbage.Nightingale here hints at writing's liberating power. As she notes, this power comes partly from writing's ability to give new order to Singh's life. But there is more: writing also proves "therapeutic" for Singh because it allows him to examine the forces that, in a sense, corrupted and jaded him.
(102).
The mechanics of this are clearly present in the text of The Mimic Men. As noted, the memoir's shape and structure flit forwards and backwards in time. And just as Garbage goes through the contents of his plate, separating that which he wants to eat at present from the chafe, Singh, too, is breaking down his life to their formative elements. Thus, in a very real sense the novel can be described as a deconstruction of Singh's life. Indeed, the driving logics behind the book's structure are reflection and contemplation. As Singh writes, he is able to get at the root causes of his alienation, intimacy issues and his failures to act with "intensity of emotion" even during the most active part of his life:
As I write, my own view of my actions alters. I have said that my marriage and the political career which succeeded it and seemed to flow from it, all that active part of my life, occurred in a sort of parenthesis. I used to feel they were aberrations, whimsical, arbitrary acts which in some way got out of control. But now, with a feeling of waste and regret for opportunities missed, I begin to question this. I doubt whether any action, above a certain level, is ever wholly arbitrary or whimsical or dishonest. I question now whether the personality is manufactured by the vision of others. The personality hangs together. It is one and indivisible (Naipaul 219, my emphasis).Here, Singh is doing nothing less than owning up to his past. He is saying that his political career and marriage to Sandra—both resounding and abject failures—were not exceptions to the pattern of his life. Rather, they fit quite cozily into the pattern of his life. Of his divisive, ruinous political career, he also writes:
To the end I behaved as though [my political life] was to be judged as another aspect of my dandysim. Criminal error! I exaggerated my frivolity, even to myself. For I find I have indeed been describing the youth and early manhood of a leader of some sort, a politician, or at least a disturber. I have established his isolation, his complex hurt and particular frenzy. And I believe I have also established… this lack of judgement and balance, the deep feeling of irrelevance and intrusion, his unsuitability for the role into which he was drawn, and his inevitable failure. From playacting to disorder: it is the pattern (ibid 220, my emphasis).Singh is connecting very significant dots here; he is establishing causal relationships between the elements of his life. Specifically, he sees the causal relationship between his mimic man life to the pain he caused Sandra on a personal, intimate level, and Isabella on a societal level.6 The very act of writing his memoirs allows Singh to act not as a "celestial camera," but as a sort of camera nonetheless, for it enables him to view his life objectively, to gain perspective on it. And it is through this gaining of perspective that he moves toward, first, greater self-understanding, and second, compassion for others. This is what allows him to take his first baby-steps away from withdrawal and self-obsession.
Naturally, this is not to say that the act of writing a memoir leaves Singh irrefutably changed for the better. Traces of his squeamishness regarding intimacy remain. And he does make a heavy sacrifice for his growing sense of peace of mind. He severs, so it seems, all ties with Isabella. Singh writes near the novel's conclusion, "It was time to leave. But there was no need for me to return to Isabella" (278). It can also be argued that while Singh comes to greater self-realization, his personal triumph is accompanied by a selfish cloistering—in his London hotel. Most cheekily, too, Naipaul throws his readers a curveball at the novel's conclusion. At the brief dinner party that makes up the final scene, Lady Stella, a white woman with whom Singh had one of his dysfunctional affairs, walks back onstage. Singh writes, "Our guest of honour arrived, with his wife. Lady Stella. I pulled my face behind the pillar and studied Garbage bringing his two-pronged knife down on the struggling cheese' (ibid 301). Comically and karmically, a woman from Singh's past returns, and we are left to wonder whether Singh and Garbage will lose their respective battles with "struggling cheese" (symbolic of stifling, stunting impulses born of past traumas). No doubt, in sending Singh ducking behind a pillar, Naipaul is both winking and laughing at us and thereby staying true to his provocateur streak. But this bit of playfulness, of muddying up the end, cannot take away from Singh's journey. By novel's end, it is clear that he has taken the first baby-steps toward wholeness and peace. It is also important to note that Naipaul has even left open the possibility that Singh will one day come out of his cocoon and engage the world again. Singh writes near the novel's conclusion, "It does not worry me now, as it worried me when I began this book, that at age forty I should find myself at the end of my active life. I do not now think this is even true" (ibid 300).
The end of The Mimic Men, then,leaves Singh with no final answers, no final solutions—only greater levels of self-awareness and compassion. And Naipaul clearly does not want us to extrapolate one universal truth or philosophy or remedy from Singh's story. Hence, The Mimic Men does not take the shape of a grand, sweeping history—claiming to see a specific historical period with 20/20 hindsight. Rather, The Mimic Men is a "lowly" (fictional) memoir—a small, imperfect recording of a life, part creation, part imagination and part reflection. Yet the memoir is the very, and perhaps only, literary form that could have allowed Singh to take his first steps toward wholeness. And despite the tragic, nearly elegaic tone of The Mimic Men, this movement toward healing is definitely a pivotal part of the gripping, brutally honest and at times comic story Singh tells.
Notes
1. It might just be the subtleness and small scale of this personal redemption that have led critics to focus on the novel's tragic tone. Despite the limited, personal nature of Singh's redemption, I'll later imply that Naipaul could be saying that this kind of "small" redemption is needed before larger, society-wide changes—political reform, stable institutions—can take firm root in the postcolonial landscape.
2. This is in marked contrast to the projects of other Caribbean-born writers of the time. For example, the poet Edward Braithwaite's reaction to the polyglot reality of the Caribbean is one of embracing the parts—including the poverty-stricken and uneducated—that make up the whole; his poem trilogy, The Arrivants, attempts to cobble together a sense of identity and make a "new" history of the creolized Caribbean landscape that is comprised of European, African and indigenous elements: legends, rituals, religions and history. Braithwaite also speaks frankly about the human cost of the brutality and exploitation that accompanied British colonization, where as Naipaul seems to sweep them under the rug.
3. Naturally, I don't mean to draw a perfect one-to-one correlation between Singh and Naipaul. I don't, for example, wish to imply that Naipaul is a rampant foot and breast fetishist.
4. Naturally, it could be argued that while sensitive, Singh is weak-willed. He does not look around at the injustices of his island and ask, "What can I do?" But Singh's passivity in the face of Isabella's injustices and corrupt/incompetent institutions is, no doubt, a conscious choice by Naipaul. He is not writing a pseudo biography of a great, revolutionary figure. Rather he seems to be examining the effects of de-colonization on an intelligent but not morally exceptional everyman.
On a different note, to highlight even further Singh's sensitivity, it would be helpful to examine in brief Cecil, his cousin mentioned at the end of the drowning passage quoted above. The contrast between Singh and Cecil is most telling. Cecil embraces the path of his elitist father. He adopts the 'character' of the rich-boy tyrant. Just examine his interactions with the island's poor. To old-women roadside vendors,"[Cecil] would shout, 'Get out! Go home, you ugly bitch! Leave that blasted tray this minute if you don't want me to break it on your head.' The terrified woman would make as if to obey; he would call her back angrily and give her ten dollars or twenty dollars, extravagant payment" (ibid 189). Cecil's reaction to the harsher social realities of Isabella is to turn to outright aggression and hostility. Singh's reaction is marked by two impulses: toward withdrawal and self-loathing.
5. Here, I capitalize history because I do not mean personal history, but rather a sense of grand, societal history. Personal history is of course the incidents Singh experiences as a boy. But here, I am referring to the kind of ethnic and geographic sense of being that would allow Singh to complete the following sentence: "I am descended from a long line of great and noble…"
6. Through his protagonist's self-condemnation, then, the famously cynical Naipaul is in a way offering a cautionary tale. Naipaul here is saying that mimicry is both unnatural and destructive. For mimicry leads to not only failure and inauthentic action, but to possibly harming others, irregardless of whether the hurt is small (as can happen in the personal sphere of marriage) or large and society-wide (as can happen in politics). The very title of the book—the plurality of those mimicking—also tells us that in Naipaul's worldview, the Third World is rife with characters such as Ralph Singh. My fellow postcolonials, examine thyselves, the author seems to be saying.
Work Cited
Hughes, Peter. Contemporary Writers: V.S. Naipaul. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Thorpe, Michael. Writers and Their Work: V.S. Naipaul. Essex, England:
Longman Group LTD, 1976.
Naipaul, V. S. "The Mimic Men". Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Nazareth, Peter. "The Mimic Men as a Study of Corruption." Critical Perspectives on V.S.
Naipaul. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1977, pp. 137-52.
Nightingale, Peggy. Journey Through Darkness: The Writings of V. S. Naipaul.
St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987.
Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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