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

In an attempt, to use the author's own words, 'to 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', 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 'the existential and metaphysical crisis of an educated and professional group of middle-class Trinidadians in post-war years'1 .