Through a Heideggerian Lens: Fear, Comportment, and the Poetics of Nihilism in Naipaul’s Tell Me Who to Kill

This article re-interprets V. S. Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill” from In a Free State (1971) through a Heideggerian lens, focusing on the ‘groundlessness’ of existence and the dialectics of ‘danger’ that structure the unnamed narrator’s life within colonial ‘modernity’. Using Hiedegger’s phenomenology as a rhetorical hermeneutic, it traces how ordinary existential structures—fear, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity—surface in the narrator’s and other characters’ comportments and speech. In Heidegger’s sense, these moods do not simply describe psychological states but reveal the conditions of Dasein’s being-in-the-world and the ontological disclosures of a being unhomed by empire. By situating Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein, thrownness, and fallenness within Naipaul’s world of migration, labour, and racial precarity, the paper reveals how metaphysical homelessness becomes historically tangible. The narrator’s obsessive drive for success, his failed fraternal duty, and his descent into estrangement dramatize a colonial subjectivity torn between aspiration and abjection. In reframing Heidegger through the postcolonial experience, the article both deprovincializes European existentialism and reclaims phenomenology as a site for interrogating the psychic economies of empire. Ultimately, the novella becomes a poetics of nihilism—where the search for authenticity collapses under the weight of displacement.