The Unsettled Self: A Critical Study of Displacement and Alienation in V. S. Naipaul's Novels

Abstract This paper examines displacement and alienation in selected novels by V. S. Naipaul, arguing that Naipaul’s fiction repeatedly stages the “unsettled self” as a product of colonial disjuncture, cultural mimicry, and migratory experience. Close readings of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), The Mimic Men (1967), In a Free State (1971), A Bend in the River (1979), and The Enigma of Arrival (1987) show how Naipaul represents subjectivity as fragmented, mobile, and often painfully self-aware. The paper situates these readings within postcolonial theoretical frameworks—especially ideas of exile, hybridity, and mimicry—drawing on Edward Said’s reflections on exile and Homi Bhabha’s account of cultural hybridity. It concludes that Naipaul’s most sustained achievement is to make the psychic cost of displacement narratable without sentimentalizing it: his characters are neither mere victims nor triumphant cosmopolitans but figures who negotiate the permanent incompleteness of belonging.