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A few American writers, who have seen man and society in proper proportion, and who have had the power to realize their vision in terms of the novel, seem to have chosen two principal methods of coping with the peculiar difficulties presented by the vastness, newness, shapelessness and instability of American society and by their own inescapable self-consciousness about it. Dos Passos novels might be said to have attempted a development of this second method by putting down a series of sample borings all over the surface of America. In the novels of Dos Passos, the fate of individuals becomes ensnared inthe complex transformations of American society and politics. Indeed, the fierce of change and its oppressive influence on people bring Dos Passos to the brink of determinism: His characters seem incapable of bucking these coercive trends. The most successful characters adapt to change, allowing their principles and temperaments to be guided by the fluctuations of fashion. The present study focuses on social and political consciousness in the novels of Dos Passos.

V. S. Naipaul's fictionalized struggle to locate himself in terms of the 'others' seems to exemplary in suggesting both are possible mapping of a position and the inevitable undecidability of its outcomes. Naipaul is uniquely endowed to reflect upon bereavement. Indian by blood, Trinidadian by birth, Briton through his choice of home, and an exile through his experience and spirit, Naipaul is concerned with the loss of old dreams and old definitions, the loss of what formerly seemed to be guiding verities. A man of no single nation, his allegiances held in abeyance, he casts a dark and perceptively ironic eye on his varied worlds. He sees with awful clarity the doddering old and the brutally new. For him, the old world is a dream only vaguely, though poignantly recalled. V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River is a novel about postcolonial political and personal anxiety and about the effort to create an identity in a society whose form and history were provided by Europeans. The crisis of identity formation is seen in personal, economic, and political dimensions, from Salim's and Indar's "wild panic" to the economic rise and decline of the copper market to the Big Man's alternate imitations of European styles and his radical inventions of a mythical African past. The principal themes of A Bend in the River are reflected in the action, characters, and images of the novel. It therefore recalls themes of the journey within, of exile, of work, responsibility, and dependence, and of the necessary corruption of personal and sexual relationships in a corrupt political system.

Dos Passos wrote more than forty books during his lifetime, including poetry, plays, travel books, political tracts, histories, and biographies. He is better known, though, for his novels, and best of all for the documentary style fiction he wrote during the twenties and thirties. He is the best known for, and to those others which are representative of a period in his career or of a change in political or stylistic direction. Though it is certainly true that no American writer has been more subjected to political judgment than Dos Passos, has the history of the critical response shows that what made him the most promising American writer of the thirties and a much less respected writer. Later on, he had as much to do with his art as with his politics, if indeed the two can be separated. A critical reception never stops developing, and neither does historical consciousness ever fully reveal itself in openly stated principles or propositions.