Bruce Chatwin: Settlers, Exiles and Nomads

In spite of the fact that Bruce Chatwin's works consistently defy categorisation, there may be detected a unifying principole in the way in which they paradigmatically reiterate the basic concerns that constituted what he called his "searches"; namely the nature of man's restlessness, the conflict between settler and nomad and the question of exile and marginality. These concerns, besides being the recurrent obsessions of Chatwin's own life, are intrinsically bound with his conception and presentation of the three anthropological paradigms of settler, exile and nomad. This study explores all of Chatwin's narrative works through his representation and dramatisation of these three basic character types. The study also considers the interrelation in Chatwin's works between fictionality and non-fictionality and the function of his first-person narrators which become symptomatic devices within the overlapping dimensions of fact and fiction endorsing the ideological attitudes and viewpoints of the real author on the one hand, whilst, on the other, functioning as textual constructs whose character semes are developed according to each work.