The enigma of arrival

Enigma of Arrival

Naipaul's novel Enigma of Arrival depicts both deeply personal and collective changes. Naipaul describes the processes of transformation that individuals and societies undergo, focusing especially on issues related to human isolation, immigration, and industrialization. The narrator, who is essentially the author Naipaul himself, has moved from his native Trinidad to England during the time that Trinidad remained a British colony. As an East Indian, he already senses keenly the sense of displacement that follows him throughout his life. Moving to England opens his eyes further to the ways societies change and how those macrocosmic changes affect the inner worlds of individual human beings. Because Enigma of Arrival is largely a monologue describing the narrator's own sensory impressions of rural England, the transformations that occur in the novel are subtle. In fact, the novel's meandering pace tends to reflect the ways change happens in the real world: gradually yet at the same time shockingly fast.

The setting of Enigma of Arrival is one of its most poignant literary aspects. The way Naipaul describes the English countryside, its landscape and its flora and fauna, show how dramatic and profound transformations occur naturally. Naipaul describes the changing of the seasons both through the eyes of the narrator and through the eyes of the gardener. Sensitivity to nature's cycles can assist sensitivity to the human and social cycles of change.

Moreover, transformations of nature's minutia such as individual flowers and birds do not happen in the blink of an eye. Transformation is a slow process that nevertheless reflects a productive master plan. The changes that the narrator underwent from his journey from Trinidad to England similarly occur slowly but surely. The narrator's personal changes reflect the mysterious transformations occurring in the natural world and in the complex world of human industrial and social progress.