Through a Heideggerian Lens: Fear, Comportment, and the Poetics of Nihilism in Naipaul’s Tell Me Who to Kill

Abstract

This article re-interprets V. S. Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill” from In a Free State (1971) through a Heideggerian lens, focusing on the ‘groundlessness’ of existence and the dialectics of ‘danger’ that structure the unnamed narrator’s life within colonial ‘modernity’. Using Hiedegger’s phenomenology as a rhetorical hermeneutic, it traces how ordinary existential structures—fear, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity—surface in the narrator’s and other characters’ comportments and speech. In Heidegger’s sense, these moods do not simply describe psychological states but reveal the conditions of Dasein’s being-in-the-world and the ontological disclosures of a being unhomed by empire. By situating Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein, thrownness, and fallenness within Naipaul’s world of migration, labour, and racial precarity, the paper reveals how metaphysical homelessness becomes historically tangible. The narrator’s obsessive drive for success, his failed fraternal duty, and his descent into estrangement dramatize a colonial subjectivity torn between aspiration and abjection. In reframing Heidegger through the postcolonial experience, the article both provincializes European existentialism and reclaims phenomenology as a site for interrogating the psychic economies of empire. Ultimately, the novella becomes a poetics of nihilism—where the search for authenticity collapses under the weight of displacement.

1. Introduction

Except for fleeting images of “sugarcane” and “pitch road” [1] (p. 70), the West Indies in V.S. Naipaul (17 August 1932—11 August 2018)’s story “Tell Me Who to Kill” from In a Free State (1971) offers no golden mirage of promise or progress. Characters (inhabit a world that is, as Helen Hayward observes, “distinctly unmagical: their lives are restricted, isolated and desolate” [2] (p. 106). Departure from such ‘everydayness’ appears to be the only avenue of salvation1.

Naipaul’s twist in this story is “that for everyone, the real world is elsewhere, and accessible only by proxy” [5] (p. 204)—a condition that results in the annihilation of pure motive. The unnamed narrator, an Indian labourer from the West Indies, for fear of environmental conditioning, embodies this existential everydayness. Fearing the determinism of the environment, he desires to escape the primal condition of being inside the world. Driven by thrownness (Geworfenheit), a sense of duty and hope, he follows his younger brother to London, working relentlessly to support his education and imagining a telos that transcends his own life of labour: “He was going to break away; he was going to be a professional man; I am going to see to that” [1] (p. 70). Yet both brothers prove incapable of navigating metropolitan existence: the younger, weak and selfish, fails his promise, while the elder, strong and selfless, is consumed by resentment toward a world that thwarts his aspirations. The narrator’s attempt to force an idiosyncratic sense of freedom—a desire fed by the Caribbean dream of Hollywood star on Dayo fails [6] (p. 140). This pattern of proxy-living and subsequent failure is repeated in the story of the narrator’s uncle, Stephen. Stephen’s entire universe revolves around his son who, too, disappoints in the end.

The novella dramatizes not only a failed immigrant dream but also an ontological crisis. The narrator’s trajectory—from hopeful striving to destructive despair—may be read as a movement through fundamental moods that shape the disclosure of Being2. It is strange that Paget Henry argued that Naipaul did not need Kierkegaard to tell him anything about despair. According to him, Naipaul’s deep probing of this difficult state of the human self was original [7] (p. 14)3.

His life oscillates between an immersion in the ‘they-self’—a state shaped by curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity, which creates an illusion of control—and the collapse of this illusion into the fundamental moods of fear, anxiety, and boredom. This study examines the narrator’s existential condition through Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)’s framework foregrounding a set of existential moods—fear, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity—that structure, primarily, the narrator’s comportment and speech through which the modes of ‘abandonment’ ‘finitude’, and the indeterminacy of existence are disclosed4.

To read Naipaul through Heidegger is to open a conversation between two apparently disparate traditions—the postcolonial and the existential, exploring their interrelated and complementary roles—but it also raises a critical question: what happens when a European ontology is made to speak through a colonized subject? This paper argues that Naipaul’s novella performs precisely such a displacement, positioning man’s quest for survival at the centre in a postcolonial society. The narrator’s moods enact the colonial encounter as a drama of unheimlichkeit—a radical unhomeliness that is at once metaphysical and geopolitical. In confronting this figure, Heidegger’s Dasein is forced out of its Eurocentric abstraction and placed within a history of racialized dispossession. Thus, the reading not only applies Heidegger’s phenomenology but also exposes its limits, showing how the existential homelessness of modern man, in Naipaul’s fiction, is always already inflected by the material histories of empire, labour, and migration5.

In bringing Heidegger’s ontology into dialogue with Naipaul’s postcolonial world, this paper seeks to deprovincialize both. It argues that “Tell Me Who to Kill” stages a crisis at the intersection of Being and aesthetic history—a point where phenomenological finitude meets the wreckage of colonial modernity. The unnamed narrator’s failure to sustain hope, work, or speech reveals an ontological structure of nihilism that is inseparable from the historical structures of displacement. In this convergence of the metaphysical and the colonial, Naipaul’s novella articulates what may be called a poetics of nihilism: the experience of being in a world stripped of meaning by both existential finitude and imperial history.

2. Research Gap and Significance

Critical discussions of V.S. Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill” have predominantly focused on its postcolonial and diasporic dimensions, analyzing themes of migration, alienation, and mimicry. For example, Fawzia Mustafa studies it from a migration and alienation perspective [11] (p. 116). While these readings illuminate the socio-historical pressures on Naipaul’s characters, they often overlook the existential structures that underpin their despair. A few scholars have begun to chart this philosophical territory. Serafín Roldán-Santiago, for instance, identifies a strand in Naipaul’s work “associated closely with the existential ideas of nothingness and dissolution,” linking it to Sartre, Camus, and Hemingway [12] (p. 153). However, his analysis does not involve Martin Heidegger. Similarly, Donovan Irven, in his study of Camus and Naipaul, frames their fiction as an existential struggle between solitude and solidarity, yet limits his discussion to “a complimentary reading of two authors who speak from the post-colonial condition” [13] (p. 44)6.

More recent major studies continue to sideline “Tell Me Who to Kill” despite their its relevant philosophical concerns. Vijay Mishra’s V. S. Naipaul and World Literature (2024) situates Naipaul within frameworks of exile, indenture, and world literature, including even Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism within the framework [14] (p.142), but offers no sustained analysis of this particular novella, even though it discussed the title story—In a Free State—focussing on Bobby’s mental instability [14] (pp. 137–139). This omission is striking, given the story’s powerful dramatization of the psychic collapse Mishra theorizes elsewhere7. Sanjay Krishnan, in his chapter on In a Free State, focuses almost exclusively on the title story, making only a passing judgment on the other stories in Endnote no. 22 [16] (p. 272). He suggests that their narrative rhythm and structure shift the burden of judgment away from the characters, a remarkable insight that remains theoretically ungrounded. In all these critical engagements, the novella’s existential density, its moods of dread, futility, and paralysis, is rarely theorized as a mode of Being rather than as a symptom of displacement. This neglect is not incidental: it points to a broader hesitation within postcolonial criticism to engage European existential philosophy on its own terms, fearing its universalist claims.

The limited engagement with existential philosophy in readings of this story is compounded by a broader critical omission: few studies have systematically integrated Heidegger’s philosophy into literary analysis (e.g., [17,18,19]). This constellation of gaps—the neglect of Tell Me Who to Kill, the absence of sustained existential interpretation, and the near-complete avoidance of a Heideggerian lens—defines a significant scholarly lacuna. This absence is notable because Heidegger himself, in his later work—his controversial political entanglements with Nazism notwithstanding—mounted a profound critique of the Western project of modernity, which sought to universalize a single rational, technological, progress-driven model of life across cultures.

This study addresses that gap by turning to Heidegger’s phenomenology of moods and repositioning “Tell Me Who to Kill” at the intersection of postcolonial historicity, modernity, and the Heideggerian history of Being. Rather than merely applying Heidegger to Naipaul, the essay uses Naipaul to provincialize Heidegger.

Although Heidegger grounds his later thought in a particular linguistic-historical horizon—specifically, the German language and the historical destiny of the German people—this study moves beyond that narrow framing to articulate the universal potential of his insights. In his reflections on Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry, Heidegger writes: “‘German’ is not spoken to the world so that the world might be reformed through the German essence; rather, it is spoken to the Germans so that, from a destinal belongingness to other peoples, they might become world-historical along with them” [10] (p. 257). He further warns that “Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world,” a condition that must be comprehended “in terms of the history of Being” [10] (p. 258).

In this light, the present paper foregrounds the notion of destinal belongingness—a structure that, though articulated through Heidegger’s particularist framework, manifests across diverse global contexts. This move resonates with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s decolonial gesture of dislocating European thought from its universalist pretensions by grounding it in the material histories it elides. As Chakrabarty argues, “Capital brings into every history some of the universal themes of the European Enlightenment, but on inspection the universal turns out to be an empty placeholder” [20] (p. 70). He contends that British imperialism in India operated through a “discourse of bourgeois individualism” [20] (p. 33), while the very adjective “modern” itself presupposes “Europe as the primary habitus of the modern” [20] (p. 43).

This study draws on these insights not to align Heidegger with political appropriations such as Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasianism [21], or contemporary far-right invocations of “rootless universalism” [22], but to illuminate how Naipaul’s novella dramatizes the lived effects of modernity on ‘homeless’ colonized subjects8. The characters in the narrative remain largely unaware of the all-pervasive forces transforming their lives.

In the novella, the narrator’s fear, anxiety, boredom, and idle talk are therefore read not as abstract existential moods of Dasein, but as phenomenologies of colonial being—affective structures that reveal the violence of uprooted existence under modernity. By bridging existential phenomenology—in the sense used by Heidegger—with postcolonial critique, this study contributes to both Naipaul scholarship and the methodological renewal of postcolonial studies. It shows that the colonial subject’s struggle for selfhood cannot be fully captured through sociological or historical categories alone; it must also be understood as a disclosure of Being-in-the-world under conditions of imperial unhomeliness. In doing so, the paper reframes Naipaul’s narrative as a philosophical intervention that demonstrates how the nihilism of modernity—often regarded as a uniquely Western crisis of meaning—is in fact globally inflected, racially inscribed, and historically produced.

3. Literature Review

The existing scholarship on V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, and specifically on Tell Me Who to Kill, has largely coalesced around its thematic engagement with displacement, migration and its innovative narrative form, which is often interpreted as a mirror of postcolonial alienation. Selwyn Cudjoe, who reads Frank as the major character by conflating him with the unnamed narrator, examines the novella’s central theme of alienation through this misidentified focal figure [23] (p. 149). Timothy Weiss highlights the cultural collisions between the “marginalized, underdeveloped Third World” embodied by the sensitive, hardworking yet uneducated narrator, and the technologically advanced First World represented by England; for Weiss, the protagonist appears “programmed for defeat” by his familial, cultural, and social circumstances [24] (p. 171). Shashi Kamra argued that past and present, West Indies and London, “collapse, coalesce, and become interchangeable in his confused consciousness” [25] (p. 155).

A significant corpus of criticism also examines the socio-political dimensions of the narrative. Sue Thomas reads “Tell Me Who to Kill” as a deliberate story à thèse, arguing that it encapsulates Naipaul’s complex and ambivalent engagement with race relations in 1950s and 1960s England [26] (p. 230). Sanjay Krishnan widens the framework by describing In a Free State as “a collection of stories about individual displacement in a globalized world” [16] (p. 125). Bruce King emphasizes how “ambition, education, illusions and travel fracture family bonds,” arguing that personal flaws and lack of self-knowledge can be as damaging as external circumstances [27] (p. 92).

Parallel to these thematic readings, other scholars have paid close attention to the formal and narratological strategies Naipaul employs to convey this fractured experience. Dexu Zhang, in an analysis of the first two stories of the collection, identifies a “perspectival detachment” and a “foregrounded artificiality” in their style. Zhang argues that these “confessional narratives,” with their peculiarities, place a demand for “readerly responsibility” on the audience to actively construct meaning [28] (pp. 63–64). This focus on narrative form as a vehicle for thematic content is a critical throughline.

In summary, the prevailing critical tradition has productively framed “Tell Me Who to Kill” through lenses of postcolonial politics, global displacement, existentialist dilemma, and narrative experimentation. These readings firmly establish the story’s position within discourses of migration and social alienation. However, by focusing primarily on the external, socio-historical causes of the narrator’s crisis, this body of work often overlooks the profound existential structures of that alienation. The very perspectival detachment and psychological collapse noted by these critics invite a deeper philosophical investigation into the nature of Being in a state of deracination—an investigation this paper will undertake through a Heideggerian phenomenological framework.

4. Methodology

This article adopts a Heideggerian phenomenological methodology largely derived from Being and Time [Sein und Zeit] (1927), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (FCM) (1983), Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity (1988), What Is Metaphysics? (1929), and The Question Concerning Technology (1954). Through these works, the article examines the narrator’s existential and colonial conditions of Being in “Tell Me Who to Kill” and critiques the culture of modernity via the concept of Enframing (Gestell). The analysis proceeds along two interconnected levels.

First, the article interprets fear, anxiety, and boredom not as psychological states but as ontological attunements—fundamental moods through which the world discloses itself, revealing its mystery across various situations, pleasant or distressing. However, instead of critiquing the logic alone, or seeing anxiety as imbued with a calm theoretical element, it prioritizes a violent, noncognitive side of the fundamental attunements9. Within this framework, curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity function as everyday structures of distraction that sustain the narrator’s immersion in the “they-self,” concealing authentic self-understanding.

The paper shows how the narrator, starting from the Heideggerian concept of ‘abandonment’, disclosing the existential and colonial thrownness to him, realizes that his family history from his father’s side, unlike others, and his life had been one of extreme distress and meaninglessness. Against these structures, the disruptive moods of fear and anxiety, which Ian Alexander Moore considers as “free-floating”, in which “everything slips away into indifference” [29] (p. 540), reveal the precariousness of his telos and the unsettling nothingness of Being.

Second, the study advances a critique of modernity through Heidegger’s concept of Enframing (Gestell). For Heidegger, modernity is not the story of human advancement but the global intensification of technological Enframing, “an ordaining of destining” [30] (p. 24), the mode of revealing that “holds sway in the essence of modern technology” [30] (p. 20). Enframing reduces beings—including humans—to standing-reserve [Bestand]: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.” [30] (p. 17). Heidegger anticipates the danger of planetary technicity, evident in global capitalism, mass society, cultural homogenization, and the erosion of authentic historical destinies. Accordingly, the two domains he distinguishes—the common world and the subjective world [31]—become operative in the present analysis. For this reason, the paper adopts a mode of postcolonial phenomenology: a reading practice that situates European existential thought within the histories of race, migration, and imperialism. Naipaul’s narrator, caught between servitude and self-assertion, exemplifies a Dasein displaced from its historical ground, where the moods of fear and anxiety are refracted through the lived experience of colonial dispossession. Close textual analysis of Naipaul’s language of fatigue, resentment, and despair reveals how phenomenological groundlessness becomes a condition of postcolonial subjectivity itself.

5. Discursive Analyses

5.1. Fear: The Threat of a Definable World

For Heidegger, fear (Furcht) is an affective experience that arises when one encounters something in the world that is fearsome or threatening: something that has as its kind of being either readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenes), presence-at-hand (Vorhandenes), or Dasein-with (Mitdasein). According to Heidegger, fear compels Dasein to turn away from itself, thereby preventing Dasein from being able to face its own existence. In Heideggerian terms, fear (Furcht) is directed toward a specific, identifiable threat within the world. Unlike anxiety, which discloses the indeterminate nothingness of Being, fear always has an object: a danger, obstacle, or limitation that can be located and named. Heidegger writes, “Shrinking back in the face of what fear discloses—in the face of something threatening—is founded upon fear; and this shrinking back has the character of fleeing.” [3] (p. 230). Fear orients Dasein toward these concrete dangers, revealing the possibilities of action and the limitations imposed by the world.

The narrator of “Tell Me Who to Kill” articulates an experience that resonates deeply with this Heideggerian structure. He reflects, “And it is as though because you are frightened of something it is bound to come, as though because you are carrying danger with you, danger is bound to come. And again it is like a dream” [1] (p. 68). This captures the essence of fear’s anticipatory structure, which Heidegger describes as an “awaiting [that] lets what is threatening come back [zurtickkommen] to one’s factically concernful potentiality-for-Being” [3] (p. 391).

For the narrator, fear arises from tangible constraints—precarity, his brother’s failures, and social hierarchies that narrow his possibilities. These are not abstract anxieties but pressing threats that drive practical action, such as leaving the West Indies to work relentlessly in London, even as they expose the limits of his agency within structures of oppression.

More personally, his hostility toward his brother is charged with fear and impotent rage. But he is unable to see the interlocking paths of Enframing, which is regulating his brother’s future course of action. In the Heideggerian paradigm, his brother is a victim of “frenziedness of technology” [30] (p. 35). His initial passion to become an aeronautical engineer is replaced by his love for computer programming. The narrator observes Dayo sleeping amid filth yet boasting of “preparing for the modern world”—that is, for the ‘Com-pu-ter pro-gram-ming’, a phrase he mockingly syllabifies as though his brother were an illiterate—and smoking expensive cigarettes [1] (p. 97). Overwhelmed by resentment, the narrator imagines violent retribution but recoils before acting. Disoriented and on the edge of collapse, he exclaims: “I am taking one of you today. Two of us going today,” and feels the knife in his hand [1] (p. 102). This is not a groundless existential crisis, but a fear directed at a specific, intolerable situation and the person who embodies it. However, the threat is so overwhelming that it leads to a paralyzing collision of emotions—humiliation, impotent rage, and a desperate wish for control—which immediately undoes itself. He feels “the strength run right out of me, my bones turning to wire in my arms” [1] (p. 102). This fear is embodied within the ‘Who’ of the title “Tell Me Who to Kill” itself. Here, fear discloses the world as a place of imminent, concrete danger, but one in which the possibility of effective action is foreclosed, leading to a psychic collapse. This culmination of fear-driven paralysis bleeds into a fatalistic despair.

Thus, through a Heideggerian lens, fear in the novella functions to direct the narrator toward definable threats, simultaneously shaping his desperate actions and revealing the ultimate constriction of his possibilities within an oppressive world. In the metaphysical question of being, from Heidegger’s point of view [32] (p. 110), first, he allows space for being, then he releases himself into the nothing—i.e., he liberates himself from those idols he and everyone cling—then he lets the sweep of his suspense take its full course. The idea of nihilism and negation overpowers him. The narrator concludes: “The life is over. I am like a man who is giving up. I come with nothing, I have nothing, I leave with nothing” [1] (p. 101). In this state, his feeling of being a “free man” is the freedom of having nothing left to lose, a scorn of a world that has already defeated him through a series of specific, fear-inducing failures.

5.2. Anxiety: Fleeing in the Face of ‘Selfsameness’

In Heideggerian thought, anxiety (Angst) is a fundamental mood that discloses the groundlessness of Being. Unlike fear, which has a specific object, anxiety is characterized by an indeterminate threat that is “so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and yet it is nowhere” [3] (p. 231). This experience collapses the familiar, everyday world, revealing the “nothing” that underlies it and producing a feeling of ‘uncanny’ (Unheimlich)—unhomelike—in one’s own existence [3] (p. 233). For Heidegger, this unsettling disclosure is also a potential for authenticity, as it individuates Dasein and presents it with the “freedom to choose itself” [3] (p. 232). However, this anxiety is not nihilistic at all. It is very much part of Being.

The narrator’s psychological state is a profound literary dramatization of this Heideggerian anxiety. His despair stems not from a single threat, but from the oppressive “selfsameness” of his conditions—a Heideggerian term denoting how the disclosive mood of anxiety and the disclosed reality of one’s existence are existentially intertwined [1] (p. 233). From childhood, he is enclosed in a world of inescapable labor and familial limitation, images of which are enshrined in his memory: “the rain, the house, the mud, the field, donkey, the smoke from the kitchen” [1] (p. 68). This world is his thrown facticity, and his anxiety is the disclosure of its totalizing, suffocating nature.

His response to this anxiety is a fallen flight into inauthentic care for his brother, Dayo. He takes on the familial burden as his own, proclaiming, “I get the ambition and the shame for all of them. The ambition is like shame, and the shame is like a secret, and it is always hurting” [1] (p. 71). He sacrifices his own education and future, working tirelessly to support Dayo, bragging that “I feel I could kill anyone who make him suffer. I don’t care about myself. I have no life” [1] (p. 67). In Heideggerian terms, he flees from his own anxious individuality by completely absorbing himself into the “they-self” of his family, a strategy that ultimately collapses.

Tragically, the intended escape to London becomes a new site of existential dislocation. The purposive life he sought dissolves into a directionless existence, symbolized by the dominant metaphor of aimless ‘walking.’ He first observes this in Dayo, who roams the city “with his book” but has “nowhere to go.” The narrator soon mirrors this restlessness, stating, “I HAVE NO WHERE to go and I walk now, like Dayo” [1] (p. 101). This ceaseless, scorn-filled walking embodies anxiety’s disclosure of the world as an uncanny and meaningless space, stripped of its practical significance. As Heidegger notes, “We ‘hover’ in anxiety […] Anxiety robs us of speech” [32] (p. 101), a sentiment echoed in the narrator’s silent, compulsive motion.

In this way, the narrator’s journey illustrates the full arc of Heideggerian anxiety. It first reveals the oppressive structures of his thrown existence, prompts a flight into inauthentic sacrifice, and ultimately culminates in a total disaster that leaves him exposed to the nothingness of his collapsed future. His anxiety, therefore, not only reveals his personal despair but also functions as a powerful disclosure of Being in its primordial and unsettling openness. Hence the concept of nothing (das Nichts) in Heidegger like ‘anxiety’ is not nihilistic. Nothing is the ulterior aspect of being that constitutes the ultimate horizon for the emergence of beings in their meaningfulness [33].

5.3. Boredom: The Nothingness of the Everydayness

In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (FCM), Heidegger distinguishes three different types of boredom. The first is becoming bored by something (Gelangweiltwerden von etwas), for example, an object, person, or state of affairs (FCM §19–23) [34] (pp. 78–101). The second is being bored with something (Sichlangweilen bei etwas), where no clear source of boredom can be identified, yet the mood nevertheless persists (FCM §24–28) [34] (pp. 106–131). The third and most fundamental form, profound boredom (tiefe Langeweile) lies at the heart of Heidegger’s analysis. In it, nothing in particular is boring; rather, the totality of beings withdraws from Dasein (FCM §29–41) [34] (pp. 132–175).

Unlike the first two, profound boredom discloses an existential condition rather than a situational mood. Here, time becomes central: past, present, and future are no longer experienced as distinct but collapse into a monotonous unity. In the Heideggerian worldview, the three perspectives of time—present, having-been, and future—are not lined up alongside one another, but originarily simply united in the horizon of time as such. Originarily, there is the single and unitary universal horizon of time [34] (p. 145). As Gelven notes, Heidegger, drawing on Kant’s views on time as both inner sense and imagination, saw profound boredom as a mood that reveals the very essence of temporality [35] (p. 177).

Heidegger encapsulates the meaning of profound boredom with a haunting question: “Do things ultimately stand in such a way with us that a profound boredom draws back and forth like a silent fog in the abysses of Dasein?” [34] (p. 78). This ‘silent fog’ manifests as a specific experience of time, which stretches unbearably. He argues:

This profound boredom is the fundamental attunement. We pass the time in order to master it, because time becomes long in boredom. Time has become long for us […] We do not want to have a long time, but we have it nevertheless [34] (p. 80).

Profound boredom thus functions as a “fundamental attunement,” detaching Dasein from its everyday absorption and opening the possibility of authentic reflection. In his view, this profound boredom is linked with ‘homesickness’ as well. Freeman and Elpidorou summarize this condition as the withdrawal of beings, in which the passing of time itself disappears, merging past, present, and future into a singular temporality [36] (p. 396).

The novella contains examples of all three types of boredom. Naipaul’s narrator exemplifies Heidegger’s gradations of boredom as his consciousness moves from ordinary distractions to existential emptiness:

(a)

Gelangweiltwerden von etwas: Ordinary Boredom

The first type of boredom is evident in the narrator’s weary relationship with specific goals and memories. He is, for instance, bored by the very “ambition and shame” that fuels his desire for his brother Dayo to succeed who was going to break away; he was going to be a professional man.

From that first changed moment when he sees him, a small, smooth, fevered child lying on the “floor on a floursack spread on a sugarsack” [1] (p. 67), faced with the reality of his rustic Indian background, he is overcome by the ‘ambition and shame’ to have Dayo succeed. It is also visible in the fact that the narrator was bored with the memory of daily routine of his father’s and his own life early life of hard work connected with and the ‘donkey-cart’ and the ‘donkey’ [1] (pp. 67–68), and the way Stephen, a joker and a mocker, finds his donkey ‘funny’ [1] (p. 74). He was equally weary of his monotonous double-shift in London. His existence is reduced to relentless compulsion: bus rides, factory shifts, restaurant kitchens, basements. Life becomes an obsession: “I work and work and save and save and the money grow and grow, and when it reach two thousand pounds, I get stunned.” [1] (p. 92). This joy was short-lived. In the end, he loses all he has accumulated, rendering his labour fruitless.

Another example is his encounter with his uncle Stephen’s surprise visit with his family to his house when the narrator’s existence becomes dominated by repetitive labour and failed aspirations. Boredom unfolds in the shape of anxiety. When Stephen comes with his daughters in his car and the narrator sees the car stopping, he—while his heart is failing—quickly realizes the messy conditions of his house. In a foolish way, he races up to sweep and straighten up the house. In the end, he behaves like his father, “not caring, ready to make a joke of everything, letting people know that we have what we have, and that is that”. Despite his efforts to shape his telos through work, the monotony of his existence underscores the futility of these actions. Finally, when they came, he could notice the scorn in the face of Stephen’s Christian wife and his Christian daughters [1] (p. 76). In contrast to the directedness of the first type, situational boredom emerges from the monotony of everyday life.

(b)

Sichlangweilen bei etwas: Situational Boredom

Such boredoms are visible in everydayness of life. The narrator encounters abundant instances of situational boredom in his daily life. He comes from a society in which the frogs croak and sing in the canal and the ditches, and nobody misses him [1] (p. 77). The narrator’s story begins with his memory of deprivation in rural Trinidad. He feels the anguish and pain when he sees the differences between rich and poor:

For the rich and the professional, the world is not ordinary. I know, I see them. Where you build a hut, they build a mansion; where you have mud and a para-grass field, they have a garden; when you kill time on a Sunday, they have parties. We all come out of the same pot, but some people move ahead and some people get left behind. Some people get left behind so far they don’t know and they stop caring. Like my father [1] (pp. 70–71).

This situation is further intensified when he recollects the temperament in the family. He comes from the shameful Indian background where his father has turned his own life into a ‘story and a joke’ and the irony is deepened by the fact that he has turned the life of his children into a ‘joke’. He even joked of his illiteracy [1] (p. 71).

He wanders aimlessly, unwilling to return to the confines of home [1] (p. 77). The narrator feels pity for his brother with his “labourer’s face sleeping on the narrow iron bed” [1] (p. 95), and for the “smallness of the room” he is in without sunshine and with concrete wall outside. He notices “the dirtiness of his finger-nails and hands, the fatness at the top of his arms.” [1] (p. 96).

The condition in England was no less inhospitable. When the narrator finally meets his long-lost brother and he enters the kitchen to prepare food for himself and his brother, he sees, the moment he turns on the light, cockroaches scatter everywhere, over dirty old stove and mash-up pot and pan. Even upstairs, there was continuous shouting, fighting, screaming, and cursing between the old white lady and her husband in full moon light until one of them shut the other outside [1] (pp. 85–86). Finally, the narrative culminates in tiefe Langeweile, or profound boredom, where time and meaning collapse entirely.

(c)

Tiefe Langeweile: Profound Boredom

The narrative opens with the protagonist’s description of going to attend, in the present, his brother’s marriage in London, but the story unfolds episodically as there is a causal collapse of time, weaving together past and present. The narrator remembers a dreadful and insecure past in the Present Simple and Present Continuous Tense:

The cart is under the house and the donkey is in the pen at the back. The pen is wet and dirty with mud and manure and fresh grass mixed up with old grass, and the donkey is standing up quiet with a sugarsack on his back to prevent him catching cold. In the kitchen shed my mother is cooking, and the smoke from the wet wood thick and smelling [1] (p. 66).

On another occasion, the narrator tries to remember a date when his brother was sick, he is not sure of it whether it was 1954 or 1955, and he is unable to put a place to it. But he exactly recalls his house and the road that leads to it [1] (pp. 67–68).

This collapse of temporal order illustrates Heidegger’s claim that profound boredom unifies past, present, and future into a formless whole. In this state, the world is revealed as ultimately indifferent to human striving, disclosing its essential nullity. As Heidegger states, “there comes the point at which all knowledge and in particular all learned wisdom is of no further assistance” [34] (p. 142). For the narrator, this profound encounter with nothingness—where time stagnates and meaning withdraws—culminates in a clear revelation of his ontological predicament.

5.4. Curiosity: The ‘Lust of the Eyes’ and Distracted Engagement

In Heidegger’s phenomenology, ‘curiosity’ (Neugier) is an everyday mode of Being tied to the superficial drive to see. He describes it as the “lust of the eyes” [3] (pp. 214–216), a restless tendency that privileges spectacle and novelty over meaningful understanding. In this mode, Dasein’s engagement with the world becomes distracted and fleeting, absorbed in appearances rather than grounded in authentic existence. Curiosity thus distracts from one’s own possibilities, masking the deeper encounter with Being as the deeper phenomenology of curiosity is one of unrest and agitation: “Curious Dasein constantly uproots (entwurzeln) itself”. “It disperses (Zerstreuung) itself among worldly possibilities, without truly making any one of them one’s own.” [37] (p. 195). At the same time, Heidegger reminds us that the impulse to “see” is linked to care, showing that even curiosity participates in the structures of Being10. He further observes that idle talk often governs curiosity, dictating what one “must have read and seen,” and leaving it “never dwelling anywhere”. Curiosity is “everywhere and nowhere” [3] (p. 217).

The narrator exhibits this mode in his obsessive preoccupation with the success of those around him, particularly his younger brother. Personally, he could feel the inauthenticity of his existence because of the absence of realization of his dream: “I see people going away to further their studies and coming back as big men. I know that I miss out.” [1] (p. 71). To fill the vacuum, he imagines Dayo’s education as the family’s only route out of labour and limitation. Receiving Stephen’s letter with a maple leaf inside, he envisions Stephen’s son in Montreal, walking on the pavement beside the black railing, furthering his studies, and happy among the maple leaves [1] (p. 78). This vision becomes the template through which he longs to see Dayo’s future. His uncle Stephen—with his Christian name, his polished appearance—becomes a role model, a figure of progress and prosperity.

This vision becomes a consuming template for his brother’s future, pulling him into the state Heidegger terms ‘fallenness’ (Verfallen). In this mode, Dasein is absorbed in the ‘they,’ busily involved with what is “definite and positive” [38] (p. 14), to avoid its own uncanny (unheimlich) nature. In imitating Stephen’s devotion to his son, the narrator projects himself into a role of caretaker for Dayo, with a “hysterical attachment to his brighter, and worthless brother” [39] (p. 67). Surrounded by ugliness and decay, he clings to Dayo’s beauty as if it were transcendent: “He is so pretty. If he grows, he will be like a star-boy, like Errol Flynn or Farley Granger […] The beauty in that room is like a wonder to me, and I can’t bear the thought of losing it” [1] (p. 67).

While seemingly directed toward a higher purpose, the narrator’s preoccupation functions precisely as Heideggerian curiosity. It is an anxious, distracted engrossment in external details—a brother’s beauty, a cousin’s success—that serves to postpone the necessary confrontation with his own existential condition. Thus, his curiosity operates not as a path to understanding, but as a protective diversion, actively shielding him from the indeterminacy and nothingness at the core of his own life.

5.5. Idle Talk: Rum and Curry Chicken Talking

Heidegger identifies ‘idle talk’ (Gerede) as a common mode of everyday Being in which discourse circulates “groundlessly,” conveying information without fostering genuine understanding [3] (pp. 212–213). This chatter allows individuals to remain absorbed in the world of appearances, postponing a confrontation with their own authentic possibilities: “What is said-in-the-talk gets understood; but what the talk is about is understood only approximately and superficially.” [3] (p. 212). He, further, argued that idle talk is constituted by gossiping and passing the word along [3] (p. 212). Even though he considered idle talk a positive trait—not to be made fun—he argued that “idle talk has been uprooted existentially, and this uprooting is constant.” [3] (p. 214)11. In the novella, the narrator’s social world is saturated with such idle talks, which reinforces his inauthenticity and deepens his existential entrapment.

The narrator is continually subjected to the idle talk of others. His uncle Stephen—a symbol and victim of modernity—embodies this phenomenon. Stephen’s promises, particularly his pledge to take the narrator’s brother Dayo abroad for studies, are revealed as empty chatter. The narrator cynically—and accurately—dismisses them: “Stephen is just talking, or rather, it is the rum and curry chicken talking” [1] (p. 75). Heidegger makes one more important observation that idle talk is not confined to vocal gossip, but it is detectable in writing too, where it takes the form of “‘scribbling’”. In such cases, gossip feeds on “superficial reading” [3] (p. 212). The text offers a classic example of this type when Dayo’s engagement with education becomes a form of idle talk. When the narrator confronts his brother about his study—his aim was to become an aeronautical engineer—he flatly disappoints him by saying that education is not an easy thing. However, he is preparing for the modern world by taking a course in computer programming [1] (p. 97). However, the next day he sees an advertisement for the same course in the carriage of the train compartment: “PREPARE YOURSELF FOR TOMORROW’S WORLD WITH A COURSE IN COMPUTER PROGRAMMING”. He is ontologically filled with disgust: “But the hate fill my heart. I want to see his face frightened again” [1] (p. 98).

Naipaul’s depiction of the burgeoning craze for computer programming among disillusioned youths in 1971 is particularly noteworthy. He underscores how the capitalist class, alert to shifting market demands, swiftly recognised the commercial promise of this new technological field. Their strategic placement of advertisements in suburban trains reveals a calculated attempt to shape the ambitions of the younger generation, signalling the early commodification of technological skill in a rapidly modernising world. Read through the lens of Heidegger’s critique of modernism—especially his notion of Enframing (Gestell)—this moment becomes emblematic of how technological thinking reorganises human aspirations. For Heidegger, modern technology reduces both nature and human beings to mere “resources” awaiting optimisation. Naipaul’s scene reflects precisely this logic: the youths are interpellated not as individuals with existential possibilities but as potential units of labour to be channelled into the expanding technological marketplace. What appears as opportunity is, in Heideggerian terms, a mode of ordering that subtly conditions the young to perceive value only through marketable skills, thus revealing the deeper ontological enclosure imposed by modern technological culture.

This environment of empty discourse shapes the narrator’s own mode of being. He internalizes the values of the “they,” becoming obsessed with money as a source of empowerment. His life becomes a monologue of financial fantasy, what Michael Gelven would call an “inauthentic expression” that finds the world “interesting” but never personally relevant [35] (p. 107). The narrator confesses, “The money make me feel strong. The money make me feel money is easy […] The money make me feel that London is mine” [1] (p. 90). This is not a grounded plan but a secret vision, “of buying up London”, a chatter of the mind that entraps him in a cycle of hope and despair [1] (p. 94). The culmination of this idle talk occurs when, after losing his savings, he feels to “start to bleed” [1] (p. 93). Dasein is disclosed to him in a profound way. He is a witness to the prosecution of bourgeois individualism, and the glimpse of reverse migration is lurking on his mind:

But now the money gone and everything gone and I only have this suit, and it is smelling. But everything does smell here. At home, at home, windows are always open and everything get clean in the open air. Here everything is locked up [1] (p. 92).

But the pressure of idle talk is irresistible. The narrator boasts to his friend Frank:

I am going to make a lot more money, Frank. I am going to make more money than you will ever make in your whole life, you white bitch. I will buy the tallest building here. I will buy the whole street.

But even as I talk I know it is foolishness. I know that my life spoil and even I myself feel like laughing [1] (p. 70).

In this moment, the narrator is acutely aware that he is producing idle talk. He speaks the language of grandiose success dictated by a fallen world, even as he recognizes its absolute groundlessness. He perfectly illustrates Karsten Harries’s point that, “Caught up in idle talk, man is shut up in a prison which he himself has fashioned” [41] (p. 160). His own words become the bars of his cage, preventing an authentic confrontation with the ‘spoiled’ reality of his existence.

5.6. Ambiguity [Zweideutigkeit]

In Heidegger’s account, ambiguity [Zweideutigkeit] arises in everyday existence where it becomes impossible to distinguish genuine understanding from its superficial imitation. He describes a state where “everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, genuinely taken hold of, genuinely spoken, though at bottom it is not; or else it does not look so, and yet at bottom it is” [3] (p. 217). This ambiguity pervades the world of Naipaul’s narrator, destabilizing his relationships, his idols, and his very sense of self.

First, ambiguity corrupts the narrator’s perception of social success and status. His entire family engages in a paradoxical worship of his uncle Stephen—an adopted name—for his “progressiveness”. He visits them unannounced because, in view of his father, “Stephen is glad to get away from that modern life sometimes”. The narrator’s mother would be seen “chasing and killing a chicken right away” in his honour, even though whatever the family did, he mocked [1] (p. 74), because he wanted them to be “progressive” as well [1] (p. 75).

Within a Heideggerian framework, Stephen emerges as an emblem of the modern world picture. For Heidegger, “world view” does not mean a view of the world, but rather the world understood as view—a representational stance in which beings appear only insofar as they can be grasped, assessed, and positioned. To be “in the picture,” therefore, signifies possessing the requisite know-how, orientation, and readiness demanded by modernity [42] (p. 350). Stephen’s entire temperament is shaped by this representational mode: arriving unannounced in his car, mocking his brother’s domestic life and the narrator’s donkey, and offering hollow assurances in an attempt to align himself with bourgeois individualism.

The narrator feels ashamed later to think of Stephen as “a big man” [1] (p. 81). Stephen’s universe revolved around his son, and who was treated like a prince [1] (p. 81), has “gone foolish”. His world of enlightened modernity and bourgeoisie individualism came to a grinding halt: “The Prince is not coming” [1] (p. 84).

This confusion is compounded by the case study of a wealthy-seeming neighbour, whose two-storey concrete house and polished appearance the narrator studies with reverence—“the hair he comb, the shirt his hands button, the shoes his hands lace up” [1] (pp. 71–72). He is convinced that he embodies luck and prosperity. Yet after the man’s mysterious death, he discovers that the neighbour was never rich at all [1] (p. 73).

In both cases, social appearances are profoundly deceptive, perfectly illustrating Heidegger’s point that things look as if they are genuine, though at bottom they are not.

This ambiguity extends into the narrator’s most personal relationships, distorting his brother’s identity and his own. The central deception of the novella is Dayo’ supposed academic progress in London, which is exposed as a lie when the narrator discovers his brother has fled his lodgings owing rent [1] (p. 86). Dayo’s confession—“I don’t have confidence, brother. I lose my confidence”—shatters the image of the successful student [1] (p. 87). This personal ambiguity is mirrored in the narrator’s own voice. The narrator was happy that his brother learned the art of speaking with a good accent while living in Stephen’s house. He has developed a new way of talking:

He don’t talk fast now, his voice is not getting up and down, he use his hands a lot, and he is getting a nice little accent, so that sometimes he sound like a woman, the way educated people sound. I like his new way of talking, though it embarrass me to look at him and think that he my brother is now a master of language [1] (p. 80).

In England, the same quality he hated. He loses confidence in London and talks like a little boy. He makes him feel that something is wrong with him: “that someone who is using words in this way is not right. He still have his accent, but he is like a man who have no control over his speech” [1] (p. 95).

Finally, a rootless and arbitrary sense of aspiration within the family itself underscores this pervasive ambiguity. When the narrator questions Dayo about his future career, their mother suddenly interjects, “I always feel I would like him to do dentistry.” The narrator is baffled, commenting that “This is her intelligence […] she never think of dentistry or anything else for Dayo until this moment” [1] (p. 80). This moment of pure, groundless chatter reveals how familial expectations and personal ambitions are not built on genuine understanding but are instead adopted arbitrarily from the vague possibilities offered by the “they”.

Through these layered deceptions—of status, identity, and aspiration—the narrator’s encounter with ambiguity is total. The narrator’s encounter with these half-truths reveals how everyday discourse can circulate as if meaningful while concealing a deeper groundlessness. Ambiguity here not only masks the brother’s failures but also destabilizes the narrator’s sense of direction, exposing the fragility of Being-with in the face of disappointment and concealment.

6. Conclusions

Viewed through Heideggerian ontology, both early and later, Naipaul’s story “Tell Me Who to Kill” stages not merely the psychic disintegration of a migrant but the collapse of Being itself within a world rendered uninhabitable by history. his collapse unfolds at two interrelated levels: the subjective and the common.

First, through the interplay of moods—fear, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity—Naipaul transforms phenomenological categories into postcolonial realities. The narrator’s fear is inseparable from economic precarity; his anxiety is rooted in racialized displacement; his boredom arises from the temporal suspension of migration; and his idle talk mirrors the chatter and features of global modernity typified by his uncle: progressiveness, nice accent, mockery of one’s own background, and running away from the centre to the periphery sometimes. These characteristics initially promised freedom yet delivered estrangement.

Second, the unnamed narrator’s journey—from dutiful striving to nihilistic despair—embodies a form of ontological exposure that Heidegger could not have anticipated: the disclosure of Dasein under the conditions of colonial modernity. This exposure becomes visible in the narrator’s capitulation to its everyday pressures—submitting to technological dictates, adopting an affected accent, hosting performative holiday parties, arriving unannounced from the humdrum of city life, and policing the city’s social etiquette.

What emerges is a phenomenology of colonial being—a world where the metaphysical “nothing” that Heidegger describes becomes historically material, enacted through dispossession, servitude, and deferred agency. Naipaul’s migrant does not simply exemplify Heidegger’s Dasein; he rewrites it from the margin, forcing ontology to confront its racial and historical ground. The novella thus performs what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “provincializing” of Europe: it turns the universal vocabulary of existentialism into a language of colonial critique.

In rereading Naipaul through Heidegger, this study has sought to deprovincialize both. It reclaims phenomenology as a critical method for articulating the existential texture of coloniality intertwined with modernity, while revealing that the alienation central to modern existence is inseparable from imperial histories of displacement and labor. “Tell Me Who to Kill” becomes, in this light, a poetics of nihilism—a narrative that exposes how the modern subject’s search for authenticity collapses under the twin weights of metaphysical groundlessness and historical violence.

By situating Naipaul’s fiction at this intersection of ontology and empire, the paper offers not only a new reading of “Tell Me Who to Kill” but also a broader theoretical proposition: that the project of decolonizing the humanities must pass through the phenomenological question of Being itself. In Naipaul’s migrant, Heidegger’s Dasein finds its dislocated double—haunted by history, unhomed in the world, and condemned to speak from the ruins of both modernity and meaning.