eacher, confident in a world that is "a marvel of blackness" (Lamming, 1991, p. 118). Also culpable in his departure, of course, is the experience of seeing class warfare enacted more or less along the lines of Marxist analysis. The violence of the riot, the recognition that the shift in both cultural and actual ownership of the land from the Creightons to Slime is nothing so much as trading one set of landlords and one mechanism of exploitation for another, perhaps crasser, kind. To put it another way, the island is passing from colonialism as symbolized by the Creightons and "their" village, toward neocolonialism as embodied in Slime. Further--again, with no small linguistic irony--it is inconceivable that the name of the neocolonialist Slime is not rhetorically significant.
G's growing class, anticolonialist, and race consciousness and recognition that his future does not lie in the insular confines of a newly colonized village but away from it position him well within the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman. The narrative of the black adolescent who moves toward manhood in such consciousness is a pattern of heroism, with the heightened awareness of self and the world an index of heroism. That is very much the content of Paquet's critique of In the Castle of My Skin as autobiographical, a product of Lamming's real-life alienation as a young writer in London (1982). By the end of In the Castle of My Skin, G. understands his aliena
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