Naipaul Travel Narrative Analysis

Travel writing is a kind of vehicle to introduce us to other and it dramatizes an engagement between self and the world. It focuses on the different ways of observing self and the foreign world. Travel narratives are mixed with fictional elements and figures, and that deals with the representations that are many times exaggerated and inexact and also sometime unclear and grotesque. Dissanayanke and Wickramagamage has identified "the distinction between fiction (created) and travel writing (factual) is a false one but also points to the misinterpretation, distortion, orientalisms and search for cheap effects that characterize much travel writings." They introduce three different types of travel writing: the Information- Oriented Experiential …show more content…
S Naipaul occupies a significant and central place in postcolonial era and his travel writing is based on 'intellectual analytic'. In Naipaul's travel writing, self intervenes vigorously and includes intellectual and social comments and analysis. The best thing of his travel writing is that, all travel paradigms, fictional elements, and travel strategies are vulcanized, it is marked by Seranfin Roldan Santiago in his article V.S. Naipaul‘s Vulcanization of Travel and Fiction Paradigms. Naipaul's Among the Believers is a travel narrative that deals with his visit to four non-Arab Muslim countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. By visiting these four countries, he gives different categorical presumptions about a rich, diversified, and complex culture like Islam. He exaggerates whatever contradictions he observes in the Muslim individuals. He interviews in these Muslim countries, for the sake of totalizing assumptions about the whole societies to which those individuals …show more content…
Here the text is dominated by worldviews and different ideology. For example Naipaul tells about Shafi’s experience about the act of “idol-smashing” in Malaysia to which narrator assumed that it embarrassed Shafi and on the other hand provides an earning of paradise to other Muslims. In Araby, Narrator reminds the Islamic economic idea of some Islamic groups in Malaysia “And they’re creating the impression that the Islamic economic system comprises mainly preparing ketchup and halal [ritually pure] foods. In terms of slaughtering one cow a week.” Here the narrator is somehow sarcastic in his tone also that how muslim in the name of Islam and purity slaughter cows every week just to show that how good they are at their