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Conclusion

In her lecture at the New York Public Library in December 2008, Zadie Smith passionately called for attention to the plight of contemporary immigrants who are “tragically split…between worlds, ideas, cultures, voice”, worrying about “whatever will become of them? Something’s got to give—one voice must be sacrificed for the other. What is double must be made singular” (“Speaking in Tongues” 145). Four years later, NW came out as her most concrete account of the melancholic struggles of immigrants in the socio-economic and ethno-political troubles of the early twenty-first century. In this novel, her special engagement with various complexities that immigrants confront in London makes immigrants’ vulnerability a key issue in this work.

This thesis is first and foremost inspired by academic discussions on human vulnerability. Despite the general undertheorization of the concept of vulnerability, it is generally recognized both as an ontological condition of human being and a socially induced condition that some individuals and populations, exposed to social and political violence and the ills associated with poverty, are disproportionately precarious. Immigrants in the London presented in NW are undeniably vulnerable. 

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