A Study Guide for George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535825863

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In the Castle of My Skin

George Lamming

1953

Introduction

In the Castle of My Skin, the first novel by Barbadian writer George Lamming, tells the story of the mundane events in a young boy's life that take place amid dramatic changes in the village and society in which he lives. First published in London in 1953, the novel uses such characteristic devices of modernist fiction as shifting perspectives and unreliable narration to recount the boyhood of a fairly traditional fictional protagonist: a sensitive, unusually intelligent young boy, with a protective mother, who grows up among his peers but, because of his intelligence, takes a different path.

The novel's main concern, however, is not the individual consciousness of the protagonist. Rather, Lamming uses the growth and education of G. (his hero) as a device through which to view the legacy of colonialism and slavery in Caribbean village society in the middle of the twentieth century, and to document the changes that time brings to this sleepy hamlet. The novel's primary concerns are larger than the experience of G. as an individual. Through his eyes, we see the effects of race, feudalism, capitalism, education, the labor movement, violent riots, and emigration on his small town and, by extension, on Caribbean society as a whole. In later books, Lamming continued to examine the Caribbean experience, as his protagonists migrated to London and the United States, returned to their homes in the Caribbean, and helped their home countries obtain independence. But in In the Castle of My Skin, as befits his choice of protagonist, the scope of perception is limited to the personal, domestic, and village spheres. Through this restricted view, the reader receives a comprehensive image of significant sociocultural changes in a tradition-bound part of the world.

Author Biography

Along with the novelist V. S. Naipaul and the poet Derek Walcott, the Barbadian novelist George Lamming is one of the most important figures in Caribbean Anglophone (English-speaking) literature. Lamming was born June 8, 1927, in Carrington Village, a small settlement about two miles from Barbados's capital, Bridgetown. Carrington Village was much like Creighton Village in the novel In the Castle of My Skin, in that it retained the basic structure of a plantation settlement. Lamming was raised by his unmarried mother and by Papa Grandison, his mother's devoted godfather.

Lamming attended the Roebuck Boys School in Carrington Village and was awarded a scholarship to attend Combermere High School, where a teacher encouraged his writing. When he was nineteen, Lamming left Barbados for the nearby island of Trinidad, where he obtained a teaching position at El Colegio de Venezuela. While in Trinidad, Lamming continued his involvement with the Anglo-Caribbean literary journal Bim and came to know a number of other writers like himself.

In 1950, feeling that Caribbean society was stifling his artistic ambitions, Lamming sailed for London. His literary output, previously limited to poetry, expanded. By 1960, Lamming had published four lauded novels and his study of cultural identity, The Pleasures of Exile.