A Bend in the River

by

V. S. Naipaul

Themes and Colors
Power, Freedom, and Identity Theme Icon
Racism and Diasporic Identity Theme Icon
Postcolonialism and Perpetual Unrest Theme Icon
The City vs. the Bush Theme Icon
Layers of the Past Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Bend in the River, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Power, Freedom, and Identity

A Bend in the River explores the connection between power, freedom, and identity in an unnamed African country. The absence of structure in the newly postcolonial state exposes to Salim, the narrator, how most forms of power are illusory and only upheld through certain performances of identity; in other words, the ways people effect or act out their identities, be it racial, cultural, national, or otherwise. Many of the novel’s characters initially come to…

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Racism and Diasporic Identity

The novel’s first-person narrator, Salim is a man from Africa’s Eastern coast of East Indian and Muslim descent. Naipaul utilizes Salim’s particular subjectivity, often through the unreliability and biases evident in his narration, to illustrate the interior complexities of race and class, mixed heritage, and diasporic identity—“diaspora” referring to  those affected by displacement or dispersal from their ethnic homeland. Salim is constantly an outsider, always feeling “detached” from the places he occupies. His initial move…

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Postcolonialism and Perpetual Unrest

A Bend in the River presents a pessimistic view of a postcolonial African future, charting how rampant political corruption and ingrained colonial trauma lead quickly to authoritarianism and chaos. When Salim first comes to the town at the bend in the river, it is still in the unnamed country’s early days of independence and therefore unsurprisingly unstable and dangerous. The new President quickly moves to snuff out unrest and violence through heavy military occupation, but…

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The City vs. the Bush

Throughout A Bend in the River, Naipaul examines the parallels and juxtapositions between the cultural and physical spaces of “the city” and “the bush” as they play out surrounding the novel’s central town and its fate. The central political and cultural conflict of the novel comes in the various characters and forces attempting to define what “true Africa” is and will become in the void left by European colonists. In the town, Salim is…

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Layers of the Past

A Bend in the River is full of characters attempting to escape their pasts. Its setting is a destination for foreigners and exiles alike, looking for opportunity in the newly independent country. Salim, the narrator, feels disillusioned by his people’s passivity and travels to the country in the interior looking for a new start. But his past follows him there, first in the form of one of his family’s servants, Metty, and then…

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