For a potential paper, I would be interested in focusing upon Naipaul's style. It operates within it's own middle ground,much like Naipaul attempts to forge a middle ground between his critique of both colonizers and the colonized. Naipaul has a style that is at times both translucent and ambiguous;subordinating and additive shifting narrative voices. I think it is this managing of the middle that gives Naipaul his tone that sets you at ease and feels like a naturally unfolding narrative;much like the remarks that people make about Tolstoy.
Some quotes that I would consider:
"Going home at night! It wasn't often that I was on the river at night. I never liked it. I never felt in control. In the darkness of river and forest you could be sure only of what you could see — and even on a moonlight night you couldn't see much. When you made a noise — dipped a paddle in the water — you heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you. You felt unprotected, an intruder ... You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always."
(This paragraph is exemplary of Naipaul's shifting style. We are given an ambiguous opening, then provided a little more detail, and then the initial message of the paragraph is subverted, while still retaining ambiguity in a different form. The narrator never feels in control, yet the land takes you back to something familiar that has been there always. The narrator is in sensory control(he can hear himself dip a paddle in the water), yet when he makes a sound he feels as if he is someone else. These kinds of contrasts within a single space make up much of 'A Bend in the River'.
Obviously I would consider the opening sentence. Joan Didion(I believe she cited she got this remark from Henry James, but I cannot be sure) once stated that the first sentence is perhaps the most important,and after the second sentence you can't go back. Naipaul begins the book as such:
"The world is what it is; "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it....
It wasn't only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns -- just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself -- and the Peugeot -- out of the places I had talked us into.
Some of these palavers could take half a day...."
(There is a kind of extended meditation even in the first sentence that seems to suggest that it could unravel at any moment at the turn of another thought. One semi-colon and two commas prevent the first sentence from being simply saying "The world is what it is". Even if Naipaul included the rest of the first sentence as the beginning of the second sentence(; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.... ) it still would not have the same effect as the almost back and forth yet streamlined effect that the original opening sentence holds.)
"I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do."
(This sentence would show Naipaul's acerbic wit. It is funny that the narrator is counting his lucky stars that he has finally found a place and is not 'looking for the wailing wall', because he is looking for that wall throughout the book,and never finds it. I'd like to take some moments in the paper to discuss how Naipaul constructs the dark humor in 'A Bend in the River).
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