Gray 1
Jesse Gray
English 654
Professor Santosh Khadka
April 14, 2015.
Literary Analysis Project
V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life is a novel that exploits the idea of memory. Almost like
Stephen Dedalus, or Holden Caufield, Half a Life’s main character, Willie Chandran, lives his
narrative with a full conviction to his naivetés. Like Dedalu or Caufield, he sees himself as an
important person whose attempts at greatness are frustrated by the sins of his father, or by the
parts of society that they see as only around to keep them from becoming themselves. Willie
though, as opposed to those two famous protagonists, is in the unique position of existing in such
a situation where he has to navigate not only the difficulties of coming-of-age, but also the
difficulties of having to navigate his identity cross culturally and cross nationally. In Half a Life,
Willie goes from his homeland in India, to London for school, eventually ending up following
his lover and admirer Ana to an unnamed Portuguese colony somewhere in Africa. Once in
Africa, Willie finds himself in a land unlike England or Indian before where the lines of empire
are less defined, and where despite this almost tertiary colonial landscape the hidden force of
colonial exploitation still runs underneath. One part of this landscape is, the German castle, a
dilapidated fading remnant of Africa’s colonial past, functions not only part of the post-colonial
landscape that defines Willie’s time in Africa, but also as a symbol for the flawed nature of
Willie’s attempt to use sexuality as a “loophole” to escape from his colonial past, present, and
potential future.
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Originally while in London, Willie decides to go to Africa with Ana because of how he
“depended on her for [his] idea of being a man” (133). Soon Willie find that his life as the “man
of the estate” (123) to be wholefully unfulfilling, and as a result he attempts to supplement his
life with illicit sexual experiences, such as sex with underage prostitutes and later with Graça, for
the purpose of claiming that masculinity that he assumed would be inherent in his African life.
Willie’s conflation of sex and masculinity can be traced back to the way that he assumes his own
father’s sexual life to be without the sort of capacity for mutual pleasure that women like June
and others blame on his Indian background. When discussing this with his sister, Sarojini, Willie
says “all men should train their sons in the art of seduction. But for our culture there is no
seduction… now we live like incestuous little animals in a hole” (111), thus saying that due to
his Indian father’s lack of teaching Willie how to sexually satisfy Willie’s mother, he had failed
at doing the most basic thing that Willie believes makes him a man. This emasculation of
Willie’s father by Willie is what leads him to attempt to find a way to find an identity that both
outgrows, what Willie sees, as the limitations of his father’s masculinity, while at the same time
replicating the colonial models of female sexual exploitation to discover such an identity.
On Willie’s African journey to masculinity, there is of course, his attempt at having Ana
just give him his masculinity in the form of becoming the “man of the estate,” which really is
just an overseer of the overseers, with little power to apply any authority that doesn’t come from
Ana. Besides the his sexual conquests, the only other attempt at creating an identity of masculine
power for Willie comes when he buys a gun, saying that “I feel that the religious excitement that
is supposed to come to people who meditate on the flame of a single candle in an otherwise dark
room was no greater than the pleasure I felt when I looked down a gun-sight and became very
close to my own mind and consciousness” (157). As a result of Willie’s religious experience
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with the gun, he comes to think of himself now as more of a complete person. He comes to think
of this sort of life and death power that comes with controlling a firearm as the light in “an
otherwise dark room,” or in another sense, he assumes to assume the powers of life and death in
his brandishing of an artificial phallus, that being the gun. Willie’s experience with the gun leads
not only to him assuming a sort of masculine power of potential violence, but he also uses that
feeling of control in his sexual exploits, eventually conflating the ideas of pleasure and power. In
a particularly odd scene, once Willie seemingly helps a prostitute achieve orgasm, Willie
describes it as being similar to “the split-second decision when I looked down a gun-sight” (175).
In this moment, Willie then becomes fully convinced that the way to the power and masculine
ideals that he believes he deserves and needs, is fully obtainable through the giving and taking of
secret sexual pleasures, secret at least from Ana, who is essentially his wife. This conviction of
Willie’s is built on a faulty foundation though, Willie believes that the way to transgress the
limitations of his father is to create this identity which replicates the same systems of colonial
masculine oppression that pushed his mother and father together in the first place. What Willie
doesn’t understand, is that he is not creating any sort of post-colonial way to exist, but just
repeating the same behavior in a different place.
Eventually, Willie’s search for a “loophole” to escape his colonial past, no matter how
fractured the foundation might be, then leads him to his secret love affair with Graça, the wife of
the replacement caretaker for one of Willie’s friend’s estate. Their affair is such that the only
time they can find to meet is the time in where Willie tells Ana that he is taking her back to her
home after whatever flimsy excuse for a social gathering that Willie can come up with.
Eventually Willie and Graça end up at the German castle, a large dilapidated castle, located on a
slope in this apparent emptiness, and you could see it from far away” (189), built by a man who
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“must have thought he would never die, or he had misread history” (189). It is this location that
Willie chooses to be the place where he is to take his place in the castle, and become the sexually
virile man that he always felt was out of his reach in London, due in part to his father’s legacy of
supposed sexual dysfunction, as well as the reputation his status as an Indian had given him
amongst English girls. The castle also functions as a space that serves as an ultimate symbol of
Willie’s confusion about life due to the very different “worlds” that are India, London, and
Africa. Willie and Graça’s journey to the caste is described by Willie as being “a strain…
(Where) everything fell away” (190), leaving Willie to consider his indulgence in the Graça’s
sexuality as something that “was worth any price, any consequence” (190).
Willie’s conviction here, to succumb to the sexual indulgences that Graça represents, that
he believes is a manner of escape from the limitations of the colonial worlds he has inhabited
ultimately nearly leads to his physical death. The castle ends up being full of spitting cobras, and
he and Graça are forced to leave it, realizing that “the smell of fish that had been with us; it was
the smell of snakes” (191). Possibly then, due to Willie’s sort of sexual immaturity, the smell of
fish is supposed to mean to him the smell of explicit and base sexuality (think back to the way a
group of naïve teenagers might refer to vaginal odor). Returning then, quickly, to an earlier
description of the castle, where “the turret on either side had loopholes, as if for defence” (190),
the cobras would signify not only a flaw in the loopholes of defense for the castle, but also for
the “loopholes of defense” that Willie was constructing through his sexuality and other
reaffirming colonial activities and systems.
After their visit to the German castle, Graça and Willie’s relationship essentially ends due
to the way the African climate “as the formal gardens of the German Castle, which had been
abandoned for three decades; in the climate everything speeded up and became what it had to be”
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(209). What “it had to be” then becomes for Willy, and to a lesser extent for Ana, the search for
an escape. Not an escape only from his semi-married relationship that has left Willie still
emasculated and unfulfilled, but also an escape from the new government of the area, that like
Willie, has failed to dismantle the old systems of colonial oppression, instead just serving the
same function with a different name and face. Of course this is only half an argument, as all
arguments about Willie Chandran have to be, in that Half a Life ends not with closure, but
instead with an ending that more reflects the way in which a person’s memory might function as.
Willie doesn’t see his story in complete sentences, because as the title suggests, it is only half of
his life.
Works Cited
Naipaul, V.S. Half a Life. New York. Vintage Books, 2001. Print