6 - Right of abode

Summary

British citizens have the right of abode in the United Kingdom. No right of abode in the United Kingdom derives from the status, as British nationals, of British Dependent Territories citizens, British Nationals (Overseas), British Overseas citizens, British protected persons, and British subjects.

(from Item 2, “Notes,” Passport of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)

In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul's most autobiographically transparent working fiction, the first-person narrator recounts two occasions in his adult life as a writer when he fell seriously ill. The first malady precipitated a fever that was immediately reminiscent of childhood fevers in Trinidad, where the bodily senses of disorientation and heightened sensation were also associated with the comfort and security of being looked after and protected. The second, more serious affliction he associates with adulthood and intimations of mortality and as such its occurrence functions as a narrative indicator to one of the themes the novel constantly rehearses: mutability. It is the first illness, however, that of “battle fatigue,” which obliquely acknowledges a more enduring closure. Manifested as recurring dreams where the narrator's head explodes, the condition is diagnosed as the stress of work: the work of writing and the work of travel. Part of what the novel documents, therefore, is the record of the narrator's life-long negotiation between his writing subject's dialectic of first- and third-person addresses, where the irruptions of postcolonial anxieties have revealed his pursuit of a unified subject to have been imaginary.