Voice of Exile: A Study of V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness

Abstract

The paper aims at analyzing V.S Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness as a text born out of the subjectively objective observations of an angry young man who had to ask a lot of questions to the history of the land which was once his forefathers’ homeland. The book is an indefatigable account of the author’s first visit to India. It contains his perceptive comments and elaborate descriptions about India and its people. The first hand experiences of the author seem to wage war against the memory handed over and instituted in him by his forefathers and eventually the alien locale of his birth. The narrator appears to have taken upon himself the double bind responsibilities of being an insider stationed outside the ambit of contemporary India and also as an outsider earnestly willing to relate with everything that might have happened around and framed his past. The book convincingly presents the conflict between his unwillingness to get disillusioned by the contemporary state of affairs and his forced acceptance of what can not be denied at any cost.