Hybridity and Ambivalence in V S Naipaul's The Mimic Men

"I knew that my own journey, scarcely begun, had ended in the shipwreck which all my life I had sought to avoid." This book seeks to piece together the scattered debris of V.S. Naipaul's protagonist Ralph Singh - a self-exiled minister and a disillusioned colonial subject- and investigate the ramifications of his writing enterprise. This study aims also to show that Naipaul's writing back to the centre allows a reading of his literary aesthetics as a palimpsest. Naipaul's narrative emerges from the wreckage of his personal history. His sense of displacement and fragmentation within the mainstream British culture marks his life as well as his literary creation, not only in content but also in form.