Like all of Naipaul's fiction, Guerrillas deals with unsettled individuals in an unsettled society. His literary advances in Guerrillas are in two broad areas: the portrayal of lives shaped by external political and economic forces and the use of a narrative strategy of symbolic compression. Naipaul's social grasp is tighter in Guerrillas than in earlier novels, and the compression results from a conscious change in narrative form. Gone is the model of the nineteenth-century social novel, filled with a multitude of characters and mimetic detail; here it is replaced by a storyline as compressed as that of a Nathaniel Hawthorne romance. It is as if Naipaul had discovered deeper reasons for the unsettled lives and societies of his earlier works.