The Urban Uncanny in A Bend in the River is a novel by Naipaul that explores the complex history of Kisangani, a town shaped by colonial and postcolonial fragments. The novel follows the Sisyphean protagonist Salim, who journeys from his Indian family's home in Africa to the town at the bend in the river. The narrative unfolds through the life-and-death cycle of the town, which morphs from a ghost town to the modern "hoax" of the New Domain, the President's trophy enclave. The novel portrays modernity as artificial and parodied, with the notion of historical progression toward modernity being openly parodied. The structure of the novel is divided into four parts, beginning with "The Second Rebellion’ and ending with "Battle." The text explores the concept of postcolonial urban uncanny in Africa and London, highlighting the failure of postcolonial progress and the unsettling parallel between Salim's response to the ruined European suburb and his own experience in London Salim's disenchantment with the modern European center he has been taught to view is a result of the breakdown of culturally, politically, and geographically differentiated space. His trip to London is a repetition of his friend Indar's earlier trip, where they both experience travel as a wonderful experience. Salim discovers that Europe is neither old nor new, but shrunken and mean and forbidding. He suspects that a great, modern city of privilege exists, but his experience is a repetition of the town at the bend in the river, where goods traded in the middle of London as they had in Africa. In "The Great City,’ Naipaul portrays London and Africa as coextensive spaces inhabited by a common population. The novel highlights the familiarity of Africa in the streets of London, as seen from a distance. The conflation of London and former colonial outposts is evident in the city's architecture, featuringstone benches and bridges inscribed with dolphins and camels. Salim explores his status as one of the city's "lost" inhabitants, facing his own strangeness and internal division. In Salim’s novel, the concept of the “uncanny guest” becomes irrelevant as the distinction between home and uncanny becomes irrelevant. The uncanny is a concept that constantly falls away from itself, forming a contradiction between subject and object. London, as a repetition of Salim's African city, produces uncanny anxiety, as Salim feels like a double, a copy, and an imitation. He finds peace in London by conceptually playing London against Africa, acknowledging that neither is a privileged space of belonging. Naipaul's novel explores the ghosts of pre- and post-colonial Africa, presenting a spatial and historical dynamic where the past is repressed and haunting rather than chronologically. Salim observes a relentlessly equivocating space, observing the changes to "this piece of earth’ and the palimpsestic nature of history. The novel's caricature of Mobutu ironizes tribal identity and modernity, creating an uncanny experience due to the collapse of semantic difference between what were assumed to be qualitative divisions in mind, space, or history. The National Urban Uncanny explores the overlapping temporalities and spaces that restructure postcolonial narrative lines from peripheral perspectives. In A Bend in the River, Salim returns from England's decrepit nation to confront nation- building in Africa. The concept of nation-states symbolizes European political modernity as a questionable vehicle for freedom and self-determination in the postcolonial world. Salim encounters London, a city populated by "puppets in a puppet theatre,’ which unsettles his colonial-orientation system. The blurred national boundaries and mixture of foreign and familiar populations in London reveal the theme of modern nationhood,which is explored through the African President's agenda of nationalization. The “world as it is" is a deception, as Salim experiences his foreignness in both national spaces, pondering the implications of nationalization and the role of the nation state in shaping the world.