“The Enigma of Arrival” (Conclusion) by V. S. Naipaul (post 4): Man with writer’s multiple personality, but no published book, takes pills and dies.

In the rest of this novelized memoir, the story of interest here is that of a man who has the same physical stature and the same writer’s psychology (multiple personality) as the nameless first-person narrator:

“Alan…was a small man, as small as I was. His size was one of the things that tormented him. He told me…that at school someone, one of the teachers, I believe, had referred to him as ‘dwarfish’…”(1, p. 255).

“…Alan the writer, the man with the childhood, the man with sensibility…At first he used to hint that he was at work on a book—hinting that the part of him that one saw, the part he we displaying…was just a fraction of his personality or even a disguise; that the true personality would be revealed in that book he was writing…But no book came from Alan. No novel or autobiographical novel…And that writer’s personality of Alan’s was partly genuine, and no more fraudulent than my own character, my own idea of myself as a writer, had been in 1950…” (1, pp. 287-288).

“…it was a little as if (this was the idea that came to me) the man that one knew had been subjected almost to a moral attack by the unacknowledged personality within; that the man had been pulled down by this inner personality which now sat like a watchful guardian on the man’s shoulder and was the only entity with whom Alan could now have a true dialogue….”(1, p. 293).

“He said good-bye. He never came back. I heard him once or twice on the radio—as bubbling as ever…And then one day I heard…that he had taken some pills one night…and died” (1, p. 294).

Comment

Thus, the book has two men with writer’s multiple personality, the nameless narrator (see previous posts) and Alan. The one who publishes lives; the one who does not publish dies: “publish or perish” in a nonacademic sense.

The salient feature of this novelized memoir is the namelessness of the first-person narrator. The reason it was necessary is that the protagonist both is and is not V. S. Naipaul. How can both be true? He is one of V. S. Naipaul’s alternate personalities.

1. V. S. Naipaul. The Enigma of Arrival [1987]. New York, Vintage Books, 1988.