As a child my mother always told me you are the company that you keep. I never really understood that until I grew up and saw how people acted when they were together. I am going to show how the company they kept affected Naipaul and Kincaid's main characters, leading up to their deciding to leave their homes; as well as how the British migration to Antigua affected the Antiguans.
In the novel "Miguel Street" by VS Naipaul, the narrator befriends lots of people on Miguel Street. Most of the people on Miguel Street had a negative influence on the narrator, except his mother and B. Wordsworth. The narrator was surrounded by alcoholism, abuse and prostitution on almost a daily basis. This is not to say that there were no other .
George, in my personal opinion, was the craziest one of the bunch. He beat his family and made a side show of it. It seemed like every man on Miguel Street condoned spousal abuse, but George took it to another level. He put his children on trial in from of various people on the street. He would read out what they did and then he would read out their sentence.
B. Wordsworth was a positive influence on the narrator. He showed him things he had never seen before. They read, and talked about the greatest poem ever written. B. Wordsworth gave him a sense of hope. He made him think that maybe there was something else out there that maybe everything wasn't like Miguel Street. It really hurt the narrator when Wordsworth died, because he feared that the greatest poem would still cease to exist. B. Wordsworth told the narrator that there was never really a greatest poem. I think he told him that so he would have to be sad about both losing him and never seeing the poem. .
In the final chapter the narrator who is now 18,.
has gone through his own transformation. Losing Hat as a father figure could be attributed to this. The narrator is "drinking like a fish, and doing a lot besides" (Naipaul 166).
