In the following excerpt, Cudjoe positions Naipaul in tradition of the Caribbean short story and traces the development of themes in his short fiction.

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.

In the following essay, Greenberg considers the impact of Naipaul's racial attitudes and pessimism on his novel The Mimic Men.

In the following interview, Naipaul discusses the central themes of A Way in the World, his background and ambitions, and his development as a writer.

In the following essay, Leavis praises A Way in the World, judging the work as a culmination of genres and interests, and as a combination of travel narrative, biography, ideas about oppression and the oppressed, and historical research.

In the following essay, Rohlehr discusses Naipaul's ironic approach toward and "sympathetic rejection" of Trinidadian culture.

In the following review, Mishra explores the major thematic concerns of the family letters collected in Between Father and Son and provides a biographical account of Naipaul's early life, particularly his relationship with his father.

In the following essay, Bawer offers an overview of Naipaul's literary oeuvre and judges the author an ardent and eloquent defender of civilization.

Between The Mystic Masseur and publication of In a Free State, the structural organization of Naipaul's several novels has undergone a series of discernible changes. There is a marked difference between the early and late fiction, but the alterations in technique reveal a consistent development. Employing rather traditional plots and standard narrative exposition, he offers little that is innovative in the way of structure. In each book, whether the action is presented in simple, straight-forward nar...

In the following essay, Winser traces Naipaul's use of painters and visual art in his first seven novels and two collections of short stories.

In the following essay, Timothy examines V. S. Naipaul's view, as expressed in his fiction, of Third World political attitudes and issues.

In the following excerpt from his full-length book on Naipaul's fiction, Rao analyzes the plots and themes of several of the short stories in A Flag on the Island and argues that the stories are held together by the “unifying metaphor of island life.”

In the following essay, Brown praises Naipaul's skill as a novelist, focusing on his "dark" vision of the world.

In the following essay, Jones offers a stylistic analysis of A Way in the World, maintaining that its structural tension can be resolved “in a heavier scrutiny of the politics of diaspora bound with a fraught diasporic poetics.”

In the following excerpt from her full-length study of Naipaul's work, Nightingale shows how themes of postcolonial futility and wasted lives in Miguel Street become more explicit and pessimistic in the short stories that make up A Flag on the Island.

In the following review, Eagleton places Naipaul within the context of other English literary emigrés and contends that the essays and speeches collected in Literary Occasions chart “the extraordinary spiral of displacements that make up Naipaul's career.”

In the following essay, Pritchard argues that Naipaul's "decline as a novelist" can be attributed to his "banishment" of irony and humor in his later works.

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.

In the following review, Buruma praises Naipaul for his depiction of India and its people as they struggle to achieve what Naipaul calls "universal civilization."

In the following review, Epstein explores Naipaul's relationship with his father as found in the letters collected in Between Father and Son.

In the following interview, Atlas offers insight into Naipaul's methods and motivations

In the following essay, Packer traces Naipaul's literary development.

In the following essay, Thieme finds it surprising that Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the following excerpt, Mustafa analyzes Naipaul's mingling of short fiction and nonfiction in In a Free State and concludes that with the work Naipaul reaches “an existentialist disassociation from the testimony he writes.”

In the following review, Shankar commends Between Father and Son for the insight it provides into Naipaul's personality and family life and asserts that the collection “is a revelation when it comes to the narrative possibilities in the compilation of letters.”

In the following review, Staples praises A Way in the World, calling it a "probing meditation on the relationships among personal, national and world histories."

In the following excerpt, Spurling argues that Naipaul does not permit his readers to form their own impressions of his characters and their surroundings; instead, he imposes his outlook "dictatorially."

In the following review, Hensher assesses Naipaul's literary achievements and deems him “a supremely deserving Nobel laureate.”

In the following review, Gilmour considers Beyond Belief to be a sequel to Among the Believers, contending that Naipaul's approach in Beyond Belief is “patient, fastidious and skeptical, generally compassionate to individuals if not to the societies to which they belong.”

In the following review, Eder argues that by "refusing to conceal or temper his own crabby vision," Naipaul achieves a "unique authenticity" in his A Way in the World.

In Naipaul's novels we trace the fortunes of the imaginative dreamer, the 'trickster' or fantasist of bookish disposition whose dreams eventually find outlets and leave some small imprint on the world. Such a character is happiest in the rare moments of pure creativity, of the uncomplicated fulfilment of the literary urge. But these manifestations of the literary spirit are paradoxical since, though in the author's eyes they represent a fulfilment, his characters experience them ...

As enlightened people we are supposed to believe that all cultures are equidistant from eternity, that none is perfect, that each should be judged by standards that are immanent in the culture itself since no one, now, believes in universal standards. They are values, and values are culture-bound. Applied to an alien culture, they become forms of vanity. But this kind of moral inflation is hardly a danger for us. The danger for us is of a sort of inverse imperialism: the suppressing of our values out of cul...

It is hard not to note a certain turning in the air when V. S. Naipaul is mentioned, a hint of taint, a suggestion of favor about to go moot. He has become a question, as in "the question of Naipaul." One catches the construction "brilliant but": brilliant but obsessive, brilliant but reductive, brilliant but so dazzled by the glare off his particular circumstance—the Indian not an Indian, the Trinidadian not a Trinidadian, the Englishman never an Englishman—that he...

In the following essay, Beck asserts that the short story “B. Wordsworth” shows how Naipaul dealt with having a British literary canon thrust upon him and his reactions to it, and his development of a calypso-influenced, Trinidadian form.

[In 1965, Naipaul] writes that "to be a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely" and this is directly reflected in the clearly etched but on the whole gentle comedy about being an English-speaking East Indian from the West Indies, as numerous characters (including Naipaul himself) in Naipaul's early prose are. Having the language but with it a different tradition—like reading Wordsworth without ever having seen a daffodil, like the young Hindu in Port of Spain, Trinida...

In the following review, Plant dismisses the title story of A Flag on the Island as another example of Naipaul's defeatist and predictably pessimistic attitude about the effects of colonialism, but also offers warm praise for the dialogue and humor in the other short stories included.

Naipaul is a writer of genius, but ["The Return of Eva Peron"], it seems to me, has had very little to do with his odd literary celebrity of the past few years. The writer who built, word by word, the dense and extraordinary Trinidad of Mr. Biswas (in the novel "A House for Mr. Biswas," 1961) was considered a genre taste. The writer who stripped that Trinidad down to the image of a bogus messiah of Black Revolution (in the novel "Guerrillas," 1975) had become our sc...

In the following review, King finds what he calls unexpected details included in the letters of Between Father and Son.

[V. S. Naipaul's essays in] "The Return of Eva Perón"] "meditate" on what he and Joseph Conrad would agree are "half-made societies," composed of those who are "prisoners of their cultures," trapped in "lunacy, despair."… [Naipaul] proves himself to be, incidentally, the best journalist of imperialism to have bothered to write in the English language. He is a kind of portable tree, who removed himself in order to invi...

In V. S. Naipaul's recent novels, there has been an increasing sense of displacement, abandonment, and denial of hope, although to a certain extent these themes have been present since his earliest work. Rootless, yet overpowered by the need to discover their own special niches in the universe, Naipaul's recent protagonists have wandered through alien geographies—foreign states on the verge of collapse, in no way capable of offering a sense of comfort or solace to these weary individual...

The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist [than V. S. Naipaul]; but the propagandists and official spokesmen for the underdeveloped nations will find little to encourage them in Naipaul's cold-eyed fictional descriptions and journalistic reports. Where they would proclaim a decent hope and a revolutionary indignation, he sees stagnation, futility, and a sinister darkness as opaque as that which confounds Conrad's Mr. Kurtz and Greene's burnt-out case. His ...

[Naipaul] has become a kind of inspired commando parachuting into the underdeveloped world and writing about the color and people and distress that United Nations statistical reports can never convey. His collected essays, The Overcrowded Barracoon, represent probably the most direct image of the Third World we're ever going to receive. These essays are superior, I think, because Naipaul never loses his novelist's command of experience and detail. This is precisely what disappoints me about hi...