Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

Chapter 3 begins with a reading of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a work that marks an epistemic shift in Naipaul’s thinking. The novel does for the plantation diaspora what Balzac did for France. After a careful reading of this triumphal novel, the chapter shows Naipaul’s fascination with modernist compositional features in his much-neglected Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). Then, suddenly uncompleted mourning creeps in. The product of that deepening melancholic imagination is his “placid” and poetic The Mimic Men (1967). It is a compulsion towards aesthetic design, to qualities by which a work of art is judged, that take him to a very personal engagement with Englishness where Naipaul takes on the challenging discourse of Romanticism (a poetic register co-existing with the high point of British imperialism). In Wordsworth there is the memorable account of the poet meeting a leech gatherer; in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul encounters his own version of the leech gatherer even as he begins to understand that “Englishness” was always a learning process for both the colonial and the colonized.

Chapter 5 marks Naipaul’s serious turn to Africa. In his first significant book on Africa, In a Free State (1971), Naipaul does not write the formulaic postcolonial novel; what he does is explore colonial repression, the silent, menacing, underside of the spirit of Victorian expansionism. And he does this in the shadow of the master, Conrad. To Naipaul, Conrad’s Africa is such a powerful foundational discourse that it shapes his reading of Africa, and especially of the Congo. But it also provides the right intertext for his own great work on Africa, A Bend in the River. The chapter argues that in the hands of Naipaul postcolonial reconstruction, decolonization, and the restructuring of class relations have a narrative function where an aesthetic impulse is always present. In that transformation human relations, and their representation, become important. For Naipaul, any new history – postcolonial or revisionist – remains equally “opaque” if in the absence of an open-ended critique it transforms social history into the dangerous, imperialist, great man narrative of history, precisely the kind of great man history celebrated under imperialism.