Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul tells the story of a boy living in Trinidad during the 1940s and his interactions or observations of the members of his community. The boy learns from the people in his community. The adults in the community rightly or wrongly are role models for this young boy. There are valuable lessons the boy learns as well as bad ones. There are issues he encounters that offer only tough solutions. One such issue is; how does he better himself? How do you acquire a better life? When he looks around at the people surrounding him no one has that sort of life. As we see in the book everyone in Miguel Street is in some way struggling. So how do you achieve a better life? The solution the author provides is to leave. And that is what the boy does, he leaves Trinidad.
To reiterate the author’s argument, what do you do when you come from a poor community and see no way of bettering yourself? Sometimes the best and only option is to leave. Let me paint the picture, if you are a child and your parents only make enough to put food on the table and have a roof over your head. You can’t ask your parents how to put yourself in a better position because they don’t know. They did as good as they could to get you in this position. What about school? School is seen as a vector for getting a better life. But in Trinidad in the 1940s the schools weren’t very good and the job opportunities coming out of school also weren’t desirable. One by one you see how each of these avenues is shutting down for you. Next your community/ neighborhood. Perhaps your friends or your neighbors can help you achieve a better life. But when you live in the slums in Trinidad. There is no one you know who is in a place where you want to be. That fundamentally is the problem here. You know you want a better life. But no one you know has that better life. So you don’t know how to get it nor do you have a shining example letting you know that it is possible. This is shown in the book when the narrator says to his mother “‘Its not my fault really. Its just Trinidad. What else anybody can do here except drink?’”(Naipaul, 167) This shows the lack of movement going on in Trinidad, there’s nothing to do. There is no progress. In an environment like that, there is no space for self-improvement. You are born poor and you die poor.
That being said, it does not mean there were no good lessons the narrator learned on Miguel street. One key lesson the narrator learned was to always support and root for your community. We see this when everyone from the neighborhood roots for Big Foot in his boxing match even though most people in the neighborhood are afraid of him. They root for him because he is from their community. It’s the sort of sentiment; he is a scary guy but he is our scary guy. That pride in where one comes from is valuable. It’s valuable because it makes one realize that there are people who support you and want you to succeed.
To summarize, one of the themes in Miguel Street is that when you come from a poor community sometimes the only option is to leave. This is in line with Naipaul’s own life, he left Trinidad to go to the U.K. Maybe he thought similar to our narrator that to get a better life you have to leave. Even though this is the case, that does not mean there is nothing good to gain from your community. After all, our communities will always be our biggest supporters even when it feels like they’re not.
Work Cited:
- Naipaul, V.S. Miguel Street. Vintage Canada, 13 Nov. 2012.
I liked how in your explanation you not only tried to explain what the situation would be like for somebody in the narrator’s shoes, but you also gave an example to further understand. Sadly in the place where Miguel lived there weren’t that many great examples that he could use to look up to, but that didnt mean that there wasn’t any at all like you mentioned. He also was able to learn about the community.
I liked your blog post. Your approach with presenting us with the very same questions the author proposes is very engaging. I kept wanting to read in order to understand what the explanation was for these questions presented. You brought us through the reality that Miguel lived through and the tough decisions he had to make. It is understandable that despite his love for his community to better himself and in the long run his community he had to leave it without forgetting the lessons he had learned.