SOURCE: Beck, Ervin. “Naipaul's ‘B. Wordsworth.’” Explicator 60, no. 3 (spring 2002): 175-76.

In the following essay, Beck asserts that the short story “B. Wordsworth” shows how Naipaul dealt with having a British literary canon thrust upon him and his reactions to it, and his development of a calypso-influenced, Trinidadian form.

V. S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men (1967) is probably the best known and most complex handling of the postcolonial literary trope of “mimicry” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin) in Caribbean literature. The short story about Black Wordsworth in Miguel Street (1959), the first book Naipaul actually wrote (c. 1955), is also his first explicit handling of the problem of literary mimicry—that is, the colonized subject responding to the English literary canon thrust upon him by colonial education and an imposed foreign culture. “B. Wordsworth” not only depicts the condition that Naipaul personally reacted to in his own experience, but in the context...