V.S. Naipaul is an expatriate from Trinidad whose primary business as a novelist is to project carefully and objectively the complex fate of individuals in a cross-cultural society. Naipaul in his fictional concerns is renewing a kind of novel in those cultures where his search for a sense of identity and the need to establish a past on which the present can properly stand has a special force. From a vision of the past as a wound, Naipaul carries three conflicting components in his personality of being a Trinidad colonial, an English metropolitan, and a person of Indian ancestry. He thus moves in his self-exploration towards a new restoration and vision of wholeness. As Naipaul confront: India in this work he visualizes a more whole world than mere country. There is a growing compassion and a wish to understand that are stronger in Naipaul’s writing now. This compassionate narrative vision enables Naipaul to capture the theme of India collapsing, mutinying, and reaching after a final integration which remains a significant aspect of writing. This paper investigates the notion of up rootedness and cultural shipwreck in the Trinidadian novelist V. S. Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men (1967). Although the novel’s fictional island may stand for Trinidad, this paper focuses on the fact that, according to Naipaul, the disordered Isabella may well match the characteristics of other chaotic Third World nations.

Keywords: Identity, Location, Techniques, Diaspora, Alienation, Homelessness, Mimicry Up Rootedness.