V.S. Naipaul’un Romanlarının Post-Kolonyal Yaklaşımla İncelenmesi

Abstract

This study is about V.S. Naipaul, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. Naipaul has been chosen for this study because he is a controversial writer, who is criticised for his critical attitude towards colonial people and societies. The aim of this study has been to show, through the study of four novels of V.S. Naipaul, “The Mystic Masseur”, “A House for Mr Biswas”, “The Mimic Men”, and “A Bend in the River”, that Naipaul’s narrators and characters apply an ambivalent attitude in their criticism of postcolonial societies and characters, with the consequence that this criticism is applied on the coloniser as well. As Naipaul is a writer who was born in a country that was colonised by the British Empire, and the settings of the before-mentioned four novels are postcolonialsocieties, the post-colonial method of analysis has been applied in thiswork. To do this, post-colonial concepts and terms like “ambivalence”, “doublevision”, “colonial stereotypes”, “mimicry”, “displacement” and “homelessness”, which have been developed by some major theorists like Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Bill Ashcroft et. al., have been employed. This analysis has shownthat V. S. Naipaul’s narrators and characters not only criticise the postcolonial society and colonials, but also criticise the coloniser, which has been illustrated studying the double-structure, or, ambivalence in their approach to the postcolonial society and characters depicted in Naipaul’s novels.