SOURCE: “The Paradox of Freedom: V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1977, pp. 81-91.

In the following essay, Boxill asserts that Naipaul understands freedom as having to be paradoxical in order to be meaningful, and discusses the symbolic “prisons” in In a Free State.

Prison is an important presence in V. S. Naipaul's first-written book, Miguel Street, and it is, if anything, more central in his recent In a Free State. Although the characters in Miguel Street live in the shadow of an actual jail, Naipaul suggests that Miguel Street and Trinidad itself are both so limiting as to deserve to be seen as wider prisons in which the characters find themselves trapped. In spite of its universal resonances, especially in the author's ability to create characters that live, Miguel Street implies that Trinidad is like a prison because of...