SOURCE: “The Comic Island,” and “Shipwrecked” in V. S. Naipaul, The Continuum Publishing Company, 1989, pp. 15-53; 73–102.

In the following excerpts from his full-length treatment of Naipaul's work, Kelly penetrates the humor of the short stories in Miguel Street and A Flag on the Island to discover the author's emerging disparagement of life and human possibility in places like Trinidad.

Miguel Street

Although Miguel Street was published in 1959, after The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), it was the first book Naipaul wrote. These three books represent Naipaul's comic vision of life in Trinidad, a wistful chronicle of the provincial rituals and absurdities of island life. Despite the narrators' satirical tone and the implicit poverty, ignorance, and suffering that lay in the background of the stories, these three works embody a powerful sense of lost innocence and youth. When the narrator of Miguel Street, for instance, reaches his...