Prejudice, satire and humor: THE BAKERS STORY

Post Colonial Literature Prejudice, Satire and Humor in The Bakers Story by V.S. Naipul Maringeles Franco Instituto Superior Lenguas Vivas Literatura Inglesa del Siglo XX Profesora Laura Kuperman February 20th, 2013

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PREJUDICE, SATIRE AND HUMOR IN THE BAKERS STORY BY V.S. NAIPAUL Is it satire and humor a way of mitigating the sense of prejudice? Prejudice is a kind of heavy burden for human kind, for human race. May be we are born with that innate negative attitude or perhaps it is society the one who lights those stereotyped beliefs in each of us. It is a real challenge to try and take advantage of it. V.S. Naipaul masterly captivates readers in The Bakers Story by showing different aspects of Post-Colonial literature while exploiting the benefits of satire and humor in order to face prejudice successfully. In times of the West Indies, the European society exalted their institutions and culture but clearly rejected the ones of the colonized people. Segmentation brought up inequality and subordination as well. On the other side of the social scale, the blacks, African people, were compelled to creolize; that is to say, they were forced to accept and assimilate culture and conventions of the dominant race. The natives who were born in the isles and were sons of Europeans or Africans were called Creoles. Creolization process in the West Indies was not a uniform; while it was imposed in all the races, Europeans did not undergo much drastic cultural changes. Coloured people occupied a segment between the blacks and the Europeans and suffered from inequality as regards social and working conditions. Color prejudice had different intensity in the different islands, even African ancestry was traced back very carefully. For the sake of identity, Post-Colonial literature portrays the way of living in those hard times and depicts the so called Local Colour. It includes a wide range of writings and writers, as varied as the geographical, historical or religious concerns of the ex-colonies. Texts are realistic and written by natives. Post-Colonial literature develops out of the Post-

THE BAKERS STORY Colonial theory, which considers the following themes: national and ethnic identity,

otherness, race, imperialism, identity crisis, gender, exploitation and language during the colonial and post-colonial periods. The concept of otherness is one of the basis around which this theory is built. It is based on the concept of being other or different, exotic or strange. It mainly burst from the experiences from the people of color in colonialism times. The concept is clearly associated with prejudice, the type of racial prejudice which arises social consequences of all kind. Nobel Prize V. S. Naipaul as a descendant of laborers shipped from India has undergone every sort of deprivations, either cultural or material in the flesh. Victimhood was his central theme; but also his comic spirit has prevailed and reinforced his intellect. In The Bakers Story he demonstrates that preconceptions can be proved wrong, and most remarkable of all, he depicts a way in which someone can successfully overcome prejudice. He smartly uses racial prejudice and through the use of humor, he creates satire. He cleverly shows how to use prejudice for ones advantage. The protagonist, being black himself, admits the fact that everyone in the story has a job according to his race, as they are supposed to be able to do certain things. The baker thinks that black people get so used to working for other people they get to believe that because they black they cant do nothing else but work for other people (Naipaul, p. 63). Later, the main character finds it difficult to be successful in his own baker store; once again, V.S: Naipaul uses satire to portray the nature of these prejudices; actually, he uses humor to show the bakers difficulty to understand something so obvious. The author also remarks the way Trinidadians see Grenadians for they think of them as being stupid people. The author takes advantage of satire and humor; he rejects the negative effect of prejudice and turns it into a positive moral. As it is stated: people with different

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backgrounds, having no education, found their own ways of dealing with prejudice through understanding their uniqueness. how prejudice can be overcome, whereas Naipaul showed an ironic but realistic way of making prejudice work to ones advantage. (n.a, 2008). As David Pryce-Jones has wonderfully put into words: Other writers born abroad have settled here and enriched our literature, but there has never been one like Naipaul. His personal story is moving; his achievement extraordinary. There is a great moral to his life's work, that the human comedy will come out all right because, when all is said and done, intellect is more powerful than vicissitude and wickedness(Jones, 2001)

REFERENCES: -Green W. A. (1993). British Slave Emancipation. Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198202783.001.0001 -Hogges S. (n.d.). "satire in the bakers story." EssayPedia.com. Feb 15, 2013 http://www.essaypedia.com/papers/satire-in-the-bakers-story-7050.html -Lye J. (1997). Some issues in postcolonial theory http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/postcol.php -(n.a.). (n.d.). Postcolonialism- an introduction http://www.enotes.com/postcolonialism-essays/postcolonialism - (n.a.). (2008). Prejudice in 'Panache' and 'The Baker's Story'. In WriteWork.com. http://www.writework.com/essay/prejudice-panache-and-baker-s-story - Pryce-Jones D. (2001). Naipaul is Truly a Nobel Man in a Free State http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-bio.html

THE BAKERS STORY -Naipaul V.S. (1962). The Bakers Story. (111-120)