A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

literature for his novel Half a Life in 2001.
In his works he strenuously endeavors to find out a permanent solution for the
Individual’s who are poignantly caught up in their Question of Identity. Naipaul’s literary
domain has extended far beyond the West Indian island of Trinidad, his first subject, and now
encompasses India, Africa, America from south to north, the Islamic countries of Asia and, not
least, England. Naipaul is Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral
sense: what they do to human beings.
Naipaul’s authority as a narrator is grounded in his memory of what others have forgotten
the history of the vanquished. Decay and disappearance are one of his fundamental themes in his
writings- but without grief, rather as something that makes existence bearable. He is an author of
a large number of fictional and nonfictional works. Naipaul continues to surprise, excite, provoke
and move readers at every turn of his literary voyage. He has a strong emotional bond with India,
which remains for him an area of pain, “an ache for which one has a great tenderness” yet from
which he wishes to separate.
Half a life is mainly the story of Willie Somerset Chandran. It is set firstly in post
independence India, at the politically protected court of the Maharaja, later in London then in the
pre-independence, Africa in a nameless country modeled on Mozambique and briefly, Berlin.
The story begins as a kind of portrait of artist where Willie is a promising youth at the Indian
mission school, living with his father, a born Brahmin who tells Willie Chandran the story of
how he married a low caste and uneducated woman. Disillusioned with school and his parents,
and uncertain of his future, Willie obtains, with the help one of one of his father’s contacts a
scholarship to a collage of education for mature students in London where he begins to write and
participate a literary social life.
The novel follows Willie Chandran as he tries to find a place or role for himself,
following his heart to Africa, and for want of anywhere else to go to Berlin. Willie, the
protagonist of the novel has many half-lives but he is not able to find his self. Half a life provides
a series of well-drawn characters which are waiting for some-thing to happen which never does.
But the real strength of the novel lies in the narrative structure, and its insistence on pushing out
the stories of these characters; their terror and fear and marginality. “The world is full of slippery
substances”, says Willie to Ana as he comes to in the hospital, when a chance falls changes his
world. Although, he constructs a life, adjusts his historical past, and elaborates his own role-