Selvon and the Limits of Heroism: A Reading of The Plains of Caroni

In an attempt, to use the author\u27s own words, \u27to project my part of the world onto the map because I found when I went to live in England that people never knew where Trinidad was\u27, Samuel Selvon has created a literature of short stories and novels that portray the lives of essentially three kinds of character - country-bound peasants, middle-class Trinidadians living in Trinidad, and lower-class West Indian immigrants, lured to London by the grandiose expectations of an inverted El Dorado myth. Criticism has, to a large extent, neglected the middle - class Trinidadian who appears in An Island Is a World (1955) and I Hear Thunder (1963), the former considered by the author to be his most ambitious, and in some ways his most important work. These two novels have as their protagonists mainly creolized Indo-Trinidadians, who in an attempt to find themselves, experience \u27the existential and metaphysical crisis of an educated and professional group of middle-class Trinidadians in post-war years\u271

Selvon and the Limits of Heroism: A Reading of \u3cem\u3eThe Plains of Caroni\u3c/em\u3e

In comparing Balgobin with Santiago, Salick argues that while The Plains of Caroni (1970) is not as parabolic as The Old Man and the Sea, both protagonists fall into the category of traditional epic hero. Concludes that in their courageous struggles to preserve their obsolete ways of life, Santiago and Balgobin are men to be honored and emulated

Selvon’s Santiago: An Intertextual Reading of \u3cem\u3eThe Plains of Caroni\u3c/em\u3e

Influence study, examining similarities between The Old Man and the Sea and The Plains of Caroni (1969), including the creation of peasant heroes who preserve an obsolete way of life and their reliance on young initiates (Manolin and Popo). Reads Hemingway’s novel as the more parabolic of the two