V. S. NAIPAUL'S A BEND IN THE RIVER T he concluding paragraphs of the novel amplify the horror of the jail scene in which Salim has at last recognized the extent of human vulnerability. In this horrific denouement, the terror of the provincial jail and its casual violence both as Naipaul imagined it in central Africa and as he experienced it in Argentina is amplified as Salim witnesses the slaughter of an entire bargeful of fellow human beings who are attempting to escape the violence just as he is. After the barge carrying hundreds of passengers caged "behind bars and wire-guards" separates from the steamer, gunshots ring out. Detached from the barge, the steamer carries Salim to safety but not before its searchlights reveal myriad numbers of insects-"moths and flying insects . . . white in the white light" (278). With its suggestion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which whiteness conveys the horror of unconstrained evil, the final lines of Naipaul's novel achieve a devastating recognition of moral vacuity and loss. Floating adrift, the fate of the barge victims evokes not just a single collapsed society but the potential collapse of the universal civilization everywhere at the hands of a myriad of assaults on order and faith. The novel's final scene returns to what Naipaul asserted at the beginning of the journey, that "men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in [the world]" (3). The terror of Naipaul's flirtation with death in Argentina and his experience of and reflections on central Africa have come together in A Bend in the River to create a novel of great moral authority. A Bend in the River is not merely an indictment of African dictators and the corruption of Western intellectuals who enable and excuse their misrule but also a cautionary tale for those who would willfully reject the advantages of their own civilization. It is an evocation of the fragility of all human life and a plea for the 59