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A Modern Man in Search of an Identity: Mr Stone of the Knights Companion

This article will analyse V. S. Naipaul’s Mr Stone and The Knights Companion (1963) which has special importance for being the first novel that Naipaul does not draw from his hometown, Trinidad experiences. Although this novel deals with the problem of belonging, rootlessness and relatedly the search for identity like those before penned, it is quite different in structure, setting and characterisation. The setting is England, and the main character is an old Londoner. These radical changes in the setting and the character indicate that he writes this very specific novel as a farewell to his cultural materials as well as a welcoming gesture to modernist traces in literature. With this understanding and sensibility, it can be inferred that the novel embodies Naipaul’s inner conflict in his identity process through an English man, Mr Stone, by referring to the proclaimed modernist literary names. Therefore, the leading aim of this article is to try to read this novel by mimicking modernist works as a reflection of Naipaul’s ambivalent identity during his authorship.