Sense of Alienation in V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life

Abstract

This research work analyses the central character of Half a Life, Willie Somerset’s quest for the purpose in his life. Fragmentation, alienation, and exile are common features in postcolonial literature. In V(idyadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul’s Half a Life Willie Chandran is the representative character of those people who have experienced the bitterness of postcolonial reality of the immigration in the foreign land. He despairingly searches for his own stable identity but cannot find any fixed identity up to the end of the novel when he is already a forty plus aged man. He proves himself as an idler and cannot get a particular form. He feels bitterness in between his double identities. To study the sense of alienation and fragmentation of the main character, it is appropriate to use postcolonial theory which is the main supportive backbone. Post-colonialism expresses about the human consequences of external—foreign—control and economic exploitation of the native people and their land. In this novel Naipaul shows how Willie suffers from multiple external forces and tries to seek his own identity in real life but in vain. Colonization causes the flux of identity, alienation, and individual predicament, and decolonized individuals still suffer from the colonial attitude and demeaner of the colonizers as an outside force even in the time of postcolonialism which forms the hybrid identity of individuals.