Migrant Drifters: Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners in a Postcolonial Comparative Context

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s third work of prose fiction, the novel Murphy, has not heretofore received substantial critical consideration as a novel of Irish migratory experience in 1930s London.1 Reception of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy to date is far less concerned with its migrant-themed or even broadly postcolonial implications than with foregrounding the novel’s philosophical or comic aspects. The novel’s reception contrasts markedly with that of a text with an established postcolonial reception, Sam Selvon’s second novel, The Lonely Londoners.2 Selvon’s novel has, since its first publication, been reviewed and discussed extensively as a novel principally concerning Anglophone Caribbean arrival and attempts at settlement in the London of the 1950s. The purpose of this paper is to re-evaluate Murphy from a postcolonial perspective, using the canonical postcolonial model of The Lonely Londoners to compare just how strikingly and considerably the two novels parallel one another in terms of their treatment of narrative forms and themes specific to the topic of migration and its vicissitudes. The Lonely Londoners is very arguably to date the canonical epitome of the innovative migrant Caribbean British novel of the 1950s and 1960s. The novel’s reception as a prime text of Anglophone Caribbean migrant-themed significance is evident from observation of discussions, since the start of this century, by Susheila Nasta, Roydon Salick and Alison Donnell. Nasta regards The Lonely Londoners as a seminal text of ‘Black British’ and ‘migrant writing’, going on to describe the novel as groundbreaking and important ‘both in terms of its strategic reinvention of London as a black city of words and for its innovative experimentations with language and literary form’.3 Donnell and Salick argue that The Lonely Londoners is now so established in Caribbean studies that the