This literary geography of western Trinidad has sought to explore a number of place-centred narratives which might otherwise be excluded from Trinidad's or Trinidad and Tobago's story. These include Trinidad's historic and literary relations with Venezuela in the nineteenth century, and archetypal and specific sites of literary interest like the yard, colonial house, oil rig, the suburbs, the port, the East–West Corridor, the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway and Woodford Square in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. While studies of Trinidadian and Trinbagonian literature examine some of these local sites, the emphasis is often on paradigms which roughly coincide with the shape of the modern state. In such analyses, there remains a tendency to overlook the commonalities or migratory flows between neighbouring islands and countries closely bound up with Trinidad geographically and culturally (and the wider Caribbean world reflected within it): Barbados, Grenada and St Vincent to the north, for example, Venezuela to the west, the Guianas to the south.

In more than one instance, this study makes an intervention in analyses which persist with the modern state as the unit for literary analysis—in part because literary spheres tend to operate, as Pascale Casanova reminds us, beyond or across political and state borders. Between the Bocas has drawn attention to the literary and imagined border crossings within, through and at the fringes of western Trinidad. So it reflects an imagined and persistent linkage of Trinidad to Venezuela through writers like Michel Maxwell Philip and Lawrence Scott and the island's connection to a broad network of the Lesser Antilles through E. L. Joseph and Eric Williams. While the epistemological approach may tend towards what Lyotard terms petits récits or localized narratives, the results of this study have yielded accounts which are thematically open to major historical trends of the region and across the globe.

Travel writing receives somewhat mixed treatment in the literary history of Trinidad. Froude, Kingsley and Trollope all serve as major Victorian reference points for Naipaul in The Middle Passage (and are often read as intertextual markers of Naipaul's essentially colonialist outlook), while even Walcott has described Kingsley's At Last as “one of the earliest books to admit the Antillean landscape and its figures into English literature”.