Growing up in colonial Trinidad as an English speaker, Levy states, Naipaul lacked a myth of origin and all his writings became thwarted attempts at autobiography. Drawing upon post-structural, particularly Lacanian, psychoanalytic theory, the author examines the relationship between cultural displacement and autobiography and postmodernism and post- colonialism in the construction of the self, positing Naipaul as a post-colonial who employs the device of combining fiction and history in his quest for autobiography. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR