In the following essay, Wise contrasts the views of Chinua Achebe and Naipaul on the subject of modern African history and culture as evinced in Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Naipaul's A Bend in the River.

In the following essay, Samantrai examines the function of imperialistic discourse in A Bend in the River and describes the novel as “a fictional documentation of the political shift from colonial to postcolonial Africa.”

Reading V. S. Naipaul's new novel A Bend In The River, one is easily reminded of Heart Of Darkness. Resemblances quickly declare themselves…. Conrad's novel is of a time of European ascendancy. Naipaul's book succeeds Conrad's and like it may come to be seen in time as one of the very best things written about Africa. The difference is that A Bend In The River is the story of European, Arab and Asian eclipse…. [Nothing] is pre-ordained in A Bend In The River. True, ...

Exile as the major condition of life is a central theme in Naipaul's A Bend in the River. (p. 100) Naipaul implies [in the novel] that there is a conflict between change and stasis which is always in equilibrium, so that nothing can progress and nothing can stay still. In the image of the water hyacinths which clog the river, so newly arrived from nowhere that they have no name, Naipaul suggests that state of restless fixation as peculiarly African, as totally beyond human control.

Africa has become remote again, a mystery to be explained—at which point enter V. S. Naipaul with a book of wonderful authority and wisdom [A Bend in the River]. (p. 791) In the sense that the narrative is conceived essentially as a political pageant in which a parvenu attempts to impose order on chaos, or rather a new chaos on the old. Naipaul's book might be said to be deficient in the conventional tensions of fiction. The interrelationships of the characters are nebulous, their development ...