Intertextuality and Originality in the Postcolonial Novel J. Conrad's Heart of Darkness in VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River

Abstract

The present paper explores the way postcolonial writers integrate prior texts in their novels while shedding light on the colonized people’s experience with their colonizer. It spots light on the different intertextual clues used in VS Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River to recall Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The paper thus probes how Conrad’s novella is reflected in Naipaul’s postcolonial novel, how the latter comes up to creates an original narrative, and how this generative intertextual relationship revokes the eventual claim that may restrict the originality of the postcolonial text. The paper argues that Naipaul’s borrowing from another text to write his work constructs a new sense of originality, for the claim to originality is not about isolation but about association: the way an earlier text is incorporated in a new one.