SOURCE: “Carnival” in On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul, University of Massachussetts Press, 1992, pp. 21-46.

In the following excerpt, Weiss argues that Miguel Street is told in two voices—that of a child who loves the spirit and people of Trinidad and that of an adult who needs to explain why he had to escape the futility and imprisonment of life in Port of Spain.

Miguel Street (1959)

The narrative strategy of Miguel Street responds to a split between the author's Trinidad and English cultural selves and attempts to resolve that split through double perspectives. First, by viewing Miguel Street from the perspective of a narrator who tells the story as if he were again a boy growing up in Port of Spain, the author can write from the base of his colonial Trinidad experiences, reentering, reconstructing, and revising that world. Second, by standing...