Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 53

V. S. NAIPAUL'S A BEND IN THE RIVER

affords strength or, as Salim conceives it, the "way out." Ancient
wisdom understood this paradox perfectly, but initially Salim
does not. At the beginning, he is no different in essentials than
those other expats who have arrived to plunder the surplus
wealth of the continent, nor is he really that much different from
the rapacious president and his followers. None of these, neither
the expats nor the Congolese elite, appear to realize the Faustian
bargain they have made in trading the security of civilization for
fleeting advantage. Indeed, Salim enters the novel as the epitome
of the half-formed and willfully ignorant modern man: transient,
rootless, faithless, and entirely confident in his own powers. Having traveled from his home on the coast in search of easy gain,
Salim enters a society that is subject to the arbitrary rule of those
in power. With his plan of cashing out at just the right moment
and believing himself immune to all risks, Salim is not just willfully blind: he is a participant as well in the enormous scheme
of evil that engulfs the country. Eventually, having lost his livelihood and his personal security amid the general disorder, Salim
becomes "the man not of Africa lost in Africa" (179)-a man, in
other words, who has "become nothing," in Naipaul's brutally
honest assessment.5

T

his novel's central theme, the necessity of a redemptive civilization, is dramatized not just through Salim but also through
the story of his childhood friend, Indar. An African of Indian
descent who studies at a British university and who, as a result of
his experiences in the larger world, gains perspective on himself
as a man "of two worlds" (145), Indar resembles Naipaul himself
in many respects. Indeed, Naipaul once stated that in his plan
for the novel, Indar "will be me,"6 and in terms of Indar's British
53



Modern Age - Winter 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2016

Contents
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