Self-Exile into Post-Colonial Chaos in V.S. Naipaul's Half A Life

Abstract

Colonialism in a particular country imposes to start mixed culture of both countries that brings intermarriage trend and becomes the producer of hybrid child as the mixed blood that causes acculturation and identity displacement. After getting freedom from the colonial hands when people plunge into the Post-Colonial era then those people who are mixed blood, have faced displacement problem and that leads them to self-exile into the Post-Colonial chaos and struggle in search of place and identity of their own.Half A Lifeis the duration to complete the self-exile into the Post-Colonial chaos and to find the path to come out of that grip. Half A Lifevisualizes clear picture of hybrid self exiled people and their struggling to find out the culture of his ownwith original identity in homeland. So that it shows the way to set the footstep of Post-Colonial people for emancipation from the grip of Post-Colonial Chaos.Half A Lifeis spending time to search identity and cultural background of the homeland in colonial countries among the strange faces. Naipaul’s novelHalf A Lifeconcludes and shows that culture should be magnified for the understanding of it, as the source of life and meaning. Cultural root purifies the soul of the people, which makes life meaningful and gives unified identity. The loss of the cultural belongingpushes the individual into the abyss, which can be noticed in Naipaul’s writings. Naipaul thus opens up an avenue for the new perspective on considering the problems of belonging in the Post-Colonial world. The new perception should be applied for the understanding of colonized people and colonized culture so that the trauma and plight of their everyday life can be visualized, lucidly and vividly. The loss of cultural belonging makes the individual’s life fractured and she/he is compelled to live half life in the realm of confusion and disillusion without hope and home far from the own place.