SOURCE: “The Short Fiction,” in Contrary Awareness: A Critical Study of the Novels of V. S. Naipaul, Centre for Research on New International Economic Order, 1982, pp. 28-44.

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.”

The stories collected in A Flag on the Island (1967) employ the island-world as a unifying metaphor in the same manner as Miguel Street does the street-world. However, three of the eleven stories have no connection with the West Indian scene, while the title of the story dramatizes the Island life from an extra-insular perspective. The rest of the stories reflect a minute observation of the island life offering glimpses into the complex social process in the mixed...