SOURCE: Jones, Stephanie. “The Politics and Poetics of Diaspora in V. S. Naipaul's A Way in the World.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35, no. 1 (2000): 87-97.

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.”

Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. … We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves …¹

In the Minerva edition of A Way in the World, the text is subtitled “A Sequence”.² This terminology implies something more ambiguous than either “a history” or...