Pessimism and Existentialism in V.S. Naipaul
his narratives. This is also true of Naipaulian irony. The philosophic notion of nothingness and dissolution has permeated most of Naipaul's writings beginning with his Trinidadian novels, especially The Middle Passage. This view has also developed further in some of Naipaul's middle works such as Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion, The Mimic Men, and In a Free State, and in his later works such as A Bend in the River and The Enigma of Arrival. I prefer to call this a philosophic strand because the underlying currents and ideas can be classified as a variation of existentialist thought, perhaps post 1950s, that is, the ongoing existentialist thought to the present, especially as it pertains to post coloniality. Naipaul's use of this strand entails a deep pathos about life that many times ends in panic. Again, the great Naipaulian panic is brought forth. There is the mood and idea of decay and all that it can gather: dissolution, futility, corruption, and demise. It is a vision of the futility of life, especially in the post colonial world. Lost colonials roaming across the post colonial landscape, searching for a sense of identity, lost in a world that marginalizes them; their final destiny being desolation and dereliction. This Naipaulian philosophic strand projects the world as something that is constantly eroding and melting away. It constructs a deep pessimism about the world and its inhabitants who are viewed as totally absorbed in futility. Man is striving to understand his existence, trying to grasp it and find its rationale, but is failing at it. It is as Doerksen has written when describing the search for meaning in life as, "the futility of the search for the meaning of existence in both the past and the future" (108) It is important to point out that not only is this sense of futility and dissolution present in Naipaul's fiction, but also embeds his travel literature and historical texts. Specifically, The Loss of El Dorado is certainly an existentialist history of the Caribbean where characters, plots and events are headed towards colonial dissolution and decay. It is not Naipaul's bad intentions and meanness; it is the existential pessimism and nothingness, this driving, psychic force that permeates his writings.