[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 stories and by subjecting the narrator himself to irony. The narrator unselfconsciously includes himself among admirers of Big Foot, the coward who achieved fame by throwing a stone through a Radio Trinidad window “to wake them up”, and Man-man who “had seen God after having a bath”. Nor is he surprised at this sighting: “Seeing God was quite common in Port of Spain, and indeed, in Trinidad at that time … I suppose it was natural that since God was in the area Man-man should see Him.” (Miguel Street 50-1) There is development in the narrator's appreciation of the eccentricity of his surroundings as the book progresses, so that such statements become more tongue-in-cheek in later chapters than in early ones. The comic effect of these stories is also enhanced by Naipaul's use of a slightly modified form of Trinidad's racy and amusing dialect. An example is in the account of Man-man's crucifixion: when the people begin to take seriously his request to be stoned, “Man-man looked hurt and surprised. He shouted, ‘What the hell is this? What the hell you people think you doing? Look, get me down from this thing quick, let me down quick, and I go settle with that son of a bitch who pelt a stone at me’” (Miguel Street 54). Naipaul's timing is that of a skilled comic as well: “The police took away Man-man. [New paragraph] The authorities kept him for observation. Then for good” (Miguel Street 55). The cadence set up by the arrangement of these short sentences is perfect for the understated effect of the conclusion of this episode.

However, the humour of these stories is deceptive. On reflection, one realizes that the residents of Miguel Street fail to achieve their dreams, and that even the dreams are limited. The Miguel Street stories are typical of the sort of story Naipaul claims in The Middle Passage is always told in Trinidad. “It was a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure: brilliant men, scholarship winners, who had died young, gone mad, or taken to drink; cricketers of promise whose careers had been ruined by disagreements with the authorities” (MP 41). While his first two novels, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira, satirize West Indian society, emphasizing elements of farce, the Miguel Street stories establish Naipaul's deep concern for the individual in a limited and limiting milieu, regardless of his treating them with humour. Miguel Street is a microcosm of Trinidad society—“… we, who lived there, saw our street as a world …” (Miguel Street 79)—and for Naipaul, Trinidad in turn becomes representative of postcolonial societies everywhere. Here at the beginning of his career, Naipaul adopts the perspective of the child outside his hut at the end of day. The circle of light defines his world. The young narrator of the short stories demonstrates the growing awareness of one approaching maturity. At first he knows the people around him only as they wish to be known; later he begins to see their fragility. Knowledge of the society that shapes them comes later still. The narrator of Miguel Street seems to stand between these last two stages of awareness. At the end of the book after Hat's imprisonment, the young man writes, “… it was just three years, three years in which I had grown up and looked critically at the people around me. I no longer wanted to be like Eddoes. He was so weak and thin, and I hadn't realized that he was so small. Titus Hoyt was stupid and boring, and not funny at all. Everything had changed” (Miguel Street 213-14). But he is still drawing no conclusions about why the driver of a scavenging cart is the best hero-figure the street can find and why Titus Hoyt cannot be more than a figure of fun, ultimately only stupid and boring. Even in the account of bribing Ganesh to obtain a scholarship, the young narrator seems unaware of the social implications of the corruption of public figures or the results for a whole society of buying qualifications rather than earning them. Throughout the book, characters make highly critical remarks about Trinidad that seem to be habitual rather than reasoned judgments about what is missing from the society. It is Naipaul, the author, creator of narrator and stories alike, who questions the values of the society and uses the limited understanding of the narrator to imply the effects of such values on individual lives.

The dwellers on Miguel Street lack a sense of personal identity. Their concepts of self are formed by imitation of American film stars or by playing stereotyped roles approved by their peers. “I don't know if you remember the year the film Casablanca was made. That was the year when Bogart's fame spread like fire through Port of Spain and hundreds of young men began adopting the hardboiled Bogartian attitude” (Miguel Street 9). The narrator's neighbour “Bogart” has no name of his own and no profession despite the sign declaring him to be a tailor. He becomes a bigamist when his need to prove his masculinity causes him to desert his barren first wife, but it seems that without the external reinforcement of the men on Miguel Street, he still lacks a sustaining self-concept. He must return to the street “‘to be a man, among we men’” (Miguel Street 16). Similarly Big Foot has no name of his own and plays a role—the bully—to hide his underlying fear of physical pain. Even Hat who leads the street society and stands as interpreter of it for the narrator, in his youth copies the style of Rex Harrison and finally proves not to be as self-sufficient as he seems. Linked to these images demonstrating failure to establish identities are those concerning language. When Edward goes to work at the American base at Chaguaramas, he adopts American styles of dress and behaviour and alternates between a Trinidadian and an American accent. While the contrast of Titus Hoyt's florid, over-written literary efforts with his day-to-day dialect is in itself amusing, it also reveals his failure to find the level of usage which would indicate success in his efforts to educate himself and become upwardly mobile in social status.

In these stories Naipaul dramatizes another of his observations of Trinidad: although some men may attempt to be creative, to make something with either their hands or their minds, most of their efforts are futile. No number of Edward's paintings of brown hand clasping black will solve Trinidad's racial rivalries; Bogart and Popo seem to be instinctively aware of this futility when they refuse to make the items their signs advertise. Popo has found a safe way to satisfy his own creative urge when he makes “the thing without a name”: it cannot be disparaged if it is never finished and no one ever knows for what it is intended. When Popo is forced to conform and make the things his society demands, he is no longer the cheerful, easy-going man with time for talk of “serious things” with a boy. Ironically, Bhakcu whose efforts result only in the destruction or mutilation of the vehicles he loves is “also an artist” (Miguel Street 157); the outcome of his tinkering, though not productive or creative, makes him happy. Morgan is less satisfied with the realization of his ambitions: although finally the whole street both laughs at him and recognizes his artistry as a “pyrotechnicist”, he must flee. Hat serves as commentator and interpreter of these events for the youthful narrator, expressing the cynicism of these people about the likelihood of actually enjoying the fulfilment of their aims: “But as Hat said, when a man gets something he wants badly, he doesn't like it” (Miguel Street 91). Only a few lines later, the narrator reveals his own more mature perspective at the time of writing: “They said Morgan went to Venezuela. They said he went mad. They said he became a jockey in Colombia. They said all sorts of things, but the people of Miguel Street were always romancers” (Miguel Street 92). One begins to appreciate that the people of Miguel Street need to be romancers.

Another romancer and the true artist of Miguel Street is B—for Black—Wordsworth who identifies himself as the spiritual brother of White Wordsworth. Because of Naipaul's compassion, this story of a man who might have appeared as a ridiculous, lying fraud becomes one of the most moving of the collection. B. Wordsworth awakens in the narrator the sense of wonder which is essential to poetry, and he transports the narrator from Miguel Street into a lush and fruitful paradise in the middle of the city. While staring at the starry sky with the poet, the boy discovers both his own insignificance and his greatness. Although he never writes his poem, B. Wordsworth attains the perspective of a true poet, but the fate of his little garden of Eden symbolizes the likely fate of all poetic insight in this sterile society. B. Wordsworth seems to recognize something special about the boy's capacity to judge the people around him, a talent the narrator displays in a comment like the following which reveals a perception he had as a boy, not one developed later as the writer of the story. “You felt that George was never really in touch with what was going on around him all the time, and I found it strange that no one should have said that George was mad, while everybody said that Man-man, whom I liked, was mad” (Miguel Street 26).

George is one of the characters who represent the brutal and violent side of life on Miguel Street. People there accept many kinds of violence as a natural response to certain situations; children are severely beaten for misdemeanors, wives are made aware of their subservience by regular beatings, and revenge is usually sought at a physical level. It is only when George and Toni carry their beatings of women and children to extremes, or when Morgan ridicules his family by staging a trial and public flogging, that the Street condemns them. But George is also disliked because he cannot carry his liquor, and Toni Hereira cannot fit in because he is white and demeans himself in the eyes of other residents by living on Miguel Street. In The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul traces the source of their brutality not only to the slave era but to the earlier period of exploration and European settlement. Incidentally, there is a hint of his interest in Trinidad's history in this book when Titus Hoyt teaches the children the history of Fort George: “‘This fort was built at a time when the French and them was planning to invade Trinidad.’ … ‘That was in 1803, when we was fighting Napoleon.’” The boys are impressed because “We had never realized anyone considered us so important” (Miguel Street 103), foreshadowing Naipaul's claim that the history of Trinidad is unknown on the island. The use of the third person plural illustrates the colonial need to be identified with important metropolitan events past or present.

Women on Miguel Street can also become tragic figures—not because they are the objects of violence but because there is so little outlet for their human needs. Toni's woman, Angela, has fled from the suffocation of the good life as a doctor's wife in Mucurapo; she returns to the clean antiseptic smell which chokes her and to a life of inactivity and boredom with a big, new black car (that resembles a hearse) for solace. “The Maternal Instinct” is the most tragic of the stories which seem, despite the comedy of Miguel Street, to foreshadow the tragedy of A House for Mr Biswas. Laura's dreams of a better life for her eight children (of seven fathers) are shattered when her eldest daughter Lorna comes home pregnant. “And for the first time I heard Laura crying. It wasn't ordinary crying. She seemed to be crying all the cry she had saved up since she was born; all the cry she had tried to cover up with her laughter. I have heard people cry at funerals but there is a lot of showing-off in their crying. Laura's crying that night was the most terrible thing I had heard. It made me feel that the world was a stupid, sad place, and I almost began crying with Laura” (Miguel Street 115-15). When Lorna drowns, a suicide according to Hat, “Laura said, ‘It good. It good. It better that way’” (Miguel Street 117). A world where casual sex and too many children are the only outlets for the joy and loving warmth of a woman like Laura, a world where there is no other relief from poverty and no other type of creativity is, indeed, a stupid, sad place.

So, in many ways in Miguel Street Naipaul studies the responses that West Indian society forces upon its members. Bolo is ultimately driven into total withdrawal. Bolo's constant refrain through the story, “Caution”, is that black people or Trinidad people are worthless, liars and cheats who are in turn duped by the rest of the world, a refrain that is picked up by Eddoes in this story and by other characters elsewhere. This is the self-denigration Naipaul sees as a natural legacy of slavery and colonial domination. Elias is also forced to abandon ambition and hope and to accept “His Chosen Calling”; his failures are primarily the result of the brutality of his home and the deficiencies of Titus Hoyt's schooling, but he has also set himself unrealistic goals in his efforts to refute the world's judgment that all who live in an unimportant place are themselves unimportant and worthless. Naipaul discovers in Trinidad a constant need for the reassurance of superlatives to ward off the pressing fear of nonentity. It lies behind B. Wordsworth's claim to be writing the greatest poem in the world and Morgan's desire to make the most beautiful fireworks. In A House for Mr Biswas, Mohun Biswas is constantly given journalistic assignments to find those who are neediest or most evil, richest or tallest, thinnest or fastest. It is also symptomatic of the constriction of island existence that people believe it is possible to find or be the most anything.

Man-man is the first of Naipaul's characters to take refuge in the written word. Like Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur who takes pleasure in the feel of paper and the look of certain typefaces, Man-man is obsessed by the shape of letters and will spend a day writing one word, repeating a letter until the stimulus which suggested the word is withdrawn. Shaping a word is for him an attempt to order experience, to give a form and with it meaning to institutions like school and cricket which are essential parts of experience in Trinidad. With limited success, B. Wordsworth also seeks the solace of writing to ease the painful awareness of disorder and disharmony in his society. The young narrator of Miguel Street becomes the first of Naipaul's writer narrators, using writing as a way of exploring the sensibility of his society. Like Mr Biswas he starts as a sign-painter concerned with the physical shape of words rather than the concepts they express, but he becomes increasingly aware of changes in his evaluation of Miguel Street's characters and its culture; while the perspective is most often that of a boy, uncritical and easily impressed, the narrator frequently offers a more mature judgment as a comment on his own youthful simplicity which he is recreating. As Michael Gilkes says in the 1974 Mittelholzer Lecture: “Certainly it is in the work of V. S. Naipaul that the West Indian's sense of inner division, of self-alienation, achieves its most precise and disturbing expression. The young hero and narrator in Miguel Street (1959), like Lamming's ‘G’, learns as he grows up that people's personae—their apparent self-confidence and stability—are only facades behind which their fragile, inner selves crouch in fear”

It is evident that in this narrator Naipaul has portrayed a young man very much like himself. He has told Adrian Rowe-Evans (1971, 57) that his writing has helped him establish an “intellectual stance”. “In writing my first four or five books (including books which perhaps people think of as my big books) I was simply recording my reactions to the world; I hadn't come to any conclusion about it. (It was the reviewers who came to a conclusion!) But since then, through my writing, through the effort honestly to respond, I have begun to analyse. First of all, the deficiencies of the society from which I came; and then, through that, what goes to make this much more complex society in which I have worked so long.” The progression from sign-painter to writer (or in The Mystic Masseur, from Ganesh's obsession with the appearance of words to the understanding of how to use them for his own purposes) is an image which expresses Naipaul's concept of the development of a writer. “As you get older you begin to write more profoundly; you think less of the way words lie on paper, and more of meaning.” Perhaps this statement helps to explain why Salim, the narrator of Naipaul's latest novel A Bend in the River, is the least self-conscious (as a writer) of all Naipaul's narrators. Like Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men, Salim reviews his life in a postcolonial society, but while Singh emphasizes society's impact on himself as an individual and regards the act of writing as a means of defining himself to himself, Salim is more outward-looking. He tries to formulate a view of the world and to communicate it as he analyses his own experience; writing seems to be less therapy and more communication for him, as perhaps writing is now for Naipaul himself.

Although discussion of Miguel Street must take account of the negative aspects of the society Naipaul portrays, the limitations it imposes on individuals, and their generally futile efforts to break free of those restrictions, it should be noted at the same time that the Miguel Street community frequently rallies to support its members in times of trouble and that there is an element of chivalry in the behaviour of these rough people despite the narrator's disclaimer: “We were none of us chivalrous, but Nathaniel had a contempt for women which we couldn't like … And when Miss Ricaud, the welfare woman, passed, Nathaniel would say, ‘Look at that big cow.’ Which wasn't in good taste, for we all thought that Miss Ricaud was too fat to be laughed at, and ought instead to be pitied” (Miguel Street 110-11). Compassion plays a part in keeping the narrator from revealing Big Foot's cowardice to the others, and ensures that there are no jokes on the street when Laura's grandchild and Eddoes's daughter arrive. Landeg White, in V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (1975, 49), concludes from these episodes that “no one actually helps anyone else, and sympathy is limited to this occasional suspension of laughter.” However, I think this unduly underrates the importance of the community, which often replaces family. Although Popo had been judged “too conceited” by the men of the street, they try to cheer him by offering friendship when his wife deserts him. The boy narrator turns to other Street residents for comfort and “wisdom” rather than to his mother, with whom he seems to have little contact except when she chastises him. Significantly, Naipaul omitted the story “The Enemy” from Miguel Street. Written in 1955 and later included in the collection A Flag on the Island (1967), it tells of the boy's constant battles with his mother after his father's death during a storm (which is the precursor of the storm scene in A House for Mr Biswas). He discovers her love and concern for him when he sees her tears after he is injured. The sentimentality of the conclusion—“I wished I were a Hindu god at that moment, with two hundred arms, so that all two hundred could be broken, just to enjoy that moment, and to see again my mother's tears.” (A Flag on the Island87)—would have been out of keeping with the tone of Miguel Street. Thematically the story's suggestion of stronger family ties would have weakened the narrator's identification with the street and with Hat.

“The Mourners” (1950), “My Aunt Gold Teeth” (1954) and “The Raffle” (1957) also date from the period when Miguel Street was written, and are told by a boy who seems to be the Miguel Street narrator, referring to Ganesh and to the street. They, too, would weaken the unity and coherence of the earlier collection, which is so tight as to make the book more a novel than a collection of short stories. In this respect, this early work anticipates some of Naipaul's most sophisticated technical achievements, such as the structure of The Mimic Men and In a Free State. Adding to his observations of life in urban Trinidad, “My Aunt Gold Teeth” and “The Mourners” portray in fairly simple terms the erosion of Hindu life in rural Trinidad as it meets Christian and European styles, a theme fully developed in A House for Mr Biswas. Except for “Greenie and Yellow” and “The Perfect Tenants”, the other stories in A Flag on the Island are set in Trinidad and were written after Naipaul's return to the West Indies to gather material for The Middle Passage. In general the themes are similar to those of the Miguel Street stories; it seems that the return reinforced Naipaul's earlier observations.

The consciousness of race as a handicap for Negro and Indian alike is one of these themes. “The Baker's Story” in which the Negro narrator needs a Chinese to sell the bread he bakes because black people “don't like to see black people meddling with their food” (A Flag on the Island 144) is a highly amusing presentation of the way in which race restricts the individual's choices in Trinidad society. Even in the purely comic “The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book”, the diary entries of Charles Ethelbert Hillyard show the self-deprecation of a black man of little education whose job depends on a somewhat overbearing white boss.

In “A Christmas Story” the theme of self-denigration is treated in a much more serious fashion: whatever their motives, colonial missionaries foster a profound sense of worthlessness in their converts which leads to the loss of identity represented by the narrator's change of name from Choonilal to Randolph. For this Randolph is to be pitied, but he is also a victim of Naipaulian irony. The indictment of the narrator is all the more devastating because Naipaul achieves it through the character's own words. Far from a confession, the story becomes a series of rationalizations and justifications for a career of petty graft and bribery. Naipaul has managed the difficult task of suggesting that this unattractive character is himself the victim of social forces in a colonial society, forces that have created moral and ethical confusion and the loss of a consistent self-concept. However, by the time Randolph regrets being denied the chance to expiate his sin, one believes him to be simply too weak and self-seeking to confess when it is no longer necessary. Perhaps this is why the story, though technically accomplished, is not entirely successful: it is hard to care that anyone so unsympathetically portrayed is the victim of colonial domination.

“A Christmas Story” and “The Heart” both lack the humour and compassion of the other stories. In tone, they are more like The Middle Passage: exasperated, angry, fearful but aggressive. In its economical delineation of character, “The Heart” seems to achieve its purposes, but it remains a rather distasteful portrait of human weakness and viciousness. This story is one of the weak points of A Flag on the Island, which is itself a failure as a book because of its lack of unity. Perhaps it is unfair to expect fifteen years' oddments to be unified, but Naipaul has achieved coherence in most of his collections. Even The Overcrowded Barracoon arranges its articles chronologically within thematically defined sections, and The Return of Eva Peron, for all the variety of its parts, achieves strong thematic unity.

In the Miguel Street stories Naipaul takes a fairly sympathetic look at individuals in urban Trinidad. His writing records a familiar milieu and allows readers to form judgments for themselves about the conditions which produce the characters and their responses to the conditions. Naipaul does not enter into the social analysis characteristic of his later fiction, perhaps because he has not yet begun the nonfiction writing which often defines objectively the difficulties faced by characters in his fiction. It is as if he has only just begun to investigate the illuminated circle around the hut, and has not yet discovered enough weakness and corruption to be jolted out of compassion and humour into the bitterness of “A Christmas Story” and “The Heart”. …