SOURCE: “Humour and Sympathy: Miguel Street and other stories,” in Journey Through Darkness: The Writings of V. S. Naipaul, University of Queensland Press, 1987, pp. 13-24.

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.

The first book Naipaul wrote (but the third published), Miguel Street (1959), is a collection of short stories which are unified by the presence of a single narrator, a single setting, and a group of characters who individually become the focus of separate stories. The stories are further unified by themes of postcolonial futility, brutality, and lack of creativity which are lightened by humour and irony. The lightly ironic tone is reinforced by lines from calypsos quoted as comments on events in the...