International Journal of English Literature and Culture
 

International Journal of English Literature and Culture

Vol. 4(5), pp. 84-87, May, 2016

 ISSN: 2360-7831

DOI: 10.14662/IJELC2016.050

Review paper

Nostalgia through Diasporic Perception in V.S Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas

Ghan Shyam Pal

Research Scholar, Department of English, H. N. B. Garhwal Central University. E-mail: palgoraha@gmail.com

Accepted 22 June 2016

The writings of V.S. Naipaul deal with shifting identities, roots, homes and changing realities of migrants. The rootlessness is a prominent theme found in almost all of Naipaul’s writings .It generates from alienation brought about by exile; physical, psychological or social.  He is a writer who encourages us continually to question, to write about the world with the freedom of a person with no home, no country, and no affiliations. The concept of “home” and “homelessness” has always been a recurring theme of Diaspora literature, especially, the literature of the Caribbean. The historical dislocation of the Islands combined with the cultural and ethnic diversity of the area has been instrumental to give rise to what can be referred to as a plural society. The point is clear that we have a formless, casual society with puzzled standards and the emergence of the confused, unassimilated man. The disintegrated nature of the society gives the West Indian an acute sense of “homelessness” and is best described as paradoxical since it insists on roots and rootlessness; “home” and “homelessness” at the same time. The writer describes the people who had to abandon their own countries and shifted themselves in strange places without friend with little loyalties and with the feeling that they are trespassing. In the present paper, efforts have been made to establish the motif of “home” and “homelessness”; the dilemma of the nomadic society and individual, the wanderer in space and time who can find no anchorage in Naipaul’s famous work A House for Mr. Biswas.

Key words: Diaspora, nostalgia, migration, identity crisis, motif, home and homelessness.

Cite This Article As: Pal GS (2016). Nostalgia through Diasporic Perception in V.S Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. Inter. J. Eng. Lit. Cult. 4(5): 84-87

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