SOURCE: “Abroad,” in V. S. Naipaul, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 88–120.

In the following excerpt, Mustafa analyzes Naipaul's mingling of short fiction and nonfiction in In a Free State and concludes that with the work Naipaul reaches “an existentialist disassociation from the testimony he writes.”

In a Free State (1971)

This volume appears to be another innovation in Naipaul's corpus of works, not only because it simultaneously incorporates fiction and non-fiction, but also because the title novella is his first work of fiction with an African setting. The chronological contingency of the publications of The Loss of El Dorado and In a Free State also crudely suggests that there is a linkage between Naipaul's inability, or choice not, to write the history of Trinidad as other than a European one, and his African story's concentration on the besieged and outgoing European expatriate protagonists in a newly independent African nation. Furthermore...