Summary

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Summary
Summary (Masterpieces of American Fiction)
A House for Mr. Biswas chronicles the unsettled life and death of Mohun Biswas, who is born into a poor
Indian family in rural Trinidad. It is divided into two parts, framed by a prologue and an epilogue.

The last of three sons, Mr. Biswas, as he is referred to throughout, is born with six fingers on each hand at the
astrologically inauspicious hour of midnight. This is considered by a Hindu pundit to be a sign of misfortune,
and the prediction is confirmed when Mr. Biswas’s father drowns trying to rescue his son from a river. Mr.
Biswas becomes dependent on his Aunt Tara and lives with his penniless mother in a mud hut. Tara has plans
for him to become a pundit, but his mentor lacks patience with the unruly boy. Sent to work at a rum shop
owned by the family, Mr. Biswas is beaten after being falsely accused of stealing, and he vows never to
return. He gets a job as a sign writer for local shopkeepers.

When he goes to Hanuman House to paint signs for the Tulsis, a landowning Hindu family, he meets Shama,
a sixteen-year-old girl. The Tulsis arrange a marriage, which Mr. Biswas is powerless to resist. Moving into
Hanuman House, he feels trapped and lost in a house that is full of Tulsi daughters, sons-in-law, and children.
He receives no dowry and no job, and he acquires a reputation as clown and troublemaker. After a fight with
one of the sons-in-law, he moves to The Chase, a settlement of mud huts in the sugar-cane area, and runs a
small, decrepit food shop owned by the Tulsis. After six years of boredom there, while Shama bears him a
daughter, Savi, and a son, Anand, he moves to a squalid barracks in Green Vale while working as a
suboverseer on the Tulsi land. Still feeling trapped, he dreams of building his own house.

Determined to realize his ambition quickly, Mr. Biswas employs a workman to build a house close to the
barracks, even though he cannot afford it. Built with inadequate materials, the house is never completed, but
Mr. Biswas nevertheless moves into it, with Anand, while Shama, Savi and two recently born babies live at
Hanuman House. A violent storm ruins the house, which is later burned down by discontented laborers.

In part 2, Mr. Biswas moves to Port of Spain, where he stays at his sister’s home and gets a job as a reporter
for the Trinidad Sentinel. He gains notoriety as a writer of sensational human interest stories. Soon he moves
into Mrs. Tulsi’s house; she has moved to Port of Spain with her son, Owad. For a while Mr. Biswas
flourishes, but his future becomes uncertain once more when Owad goes abroad to study, Mrs. Tulsi returns to
Hanuman House, and he is demoted at the Sentinel.

Mr. Biswas’s next move in his life of wandering is to a Tulsi estate northeast of Port of Spain, where almost
the entire Tulsi family is moving. Living there rent-free, he saves money and decides to build again. This
time, the house is completed in less than a month but is destroyed by fire as a result of his own foolishness.
He moves back to Mrs. Tulsi’s Port of Spain house, to which many of the Tulsi family also move.

His son Anand excels at school, but Mr. Biswas considers his own career to be over. He forgets his long-held
goal of owning a house. He receives a job offer from the government, however, and as community welfare
officer he recovers his enthusiasm for life. In his new position, he acquires some of the accoutrements of

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success and respectability, although he cannot free himself from his insecurities.

These fears increase when Mrs. Tulsi, now old, ill, and querulous, returns to live in her house. She is followed
by Owad, returning in triumph from London. Following a quarrel, Mrs. Tulsi evicts Mr. Biswas from her
house. This leads to Mr. Biswas’s chance encounter with a solicitor’s clerk and his hasty decision to buy the
clerk’s house. He soon discovers that the house is badly constructed and that he has paid an inflated price for
it. Yet before his death five years later, he attains some satisfaction; he finally has a house he can call his own,
out of the clutches of the Tulsi family.

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Summary (Critical Guide to British Fiction)
When Mohun Biswas died of heart trouble at forty-six, jobless and penniless, leaving a wife, four children still
in school, and a three-thousand-dollar mortgage on a poorly constructed house, it might seem that he was a
failure in life. In his own eyes, however, Mr. Biswas was triumphant. Not only had he won one of the two
great battles of his life (his wife, Shama Biswas, had finally learned to put her husband and her children ahead
of the family into which she was born, the enormous Tulsi clan), but also he had bought his own house on his
own land, thus providing a place for his family to be a family. In the prologue to the novel, V. S. Naipaul
reveals Mr. Biswas’ sense of satisfaction with his achievements, while at the same time realistically
describing the house of which he is so proud. The story then moves backward in time to the birth of Mohun
Biswas and proceeds chronologically, concluding with his funeral.

Mr. Biswas, as he is called throughout the novel, was born in a mud hut on a sugar estate, born backward,
with a sixth finger, and thus obviously ill-fated from birth. His asthmatic father put all the children to work as
soon as possible, and he was delighted when this luckless boy got an opportunity to make some money
tending a calf. Unfortunately, the boy lost the calf, which drowned, and his father drowned diving for the
frightened and missing boy. Thus, early in his life, Mr. Biswas had caused the death of his father and the
breakup of the family. After he left the mud hut, he was to be homeless and alone for thirty-five years,
wandering from place to place and changing from occupation to occupation. That odyssey is the story line of
the novel.

The first jobs by which Mr. Biswas tries to secure his future are dismal failures. His apprenticeship to a pundit
leaves him with a permanent stomach problem, caused by his being forced to eat seven bananas as a
punishment for having taken two from the pundit’s bunch. The resulting nervous stomach and constipation
prevent his being able to function in the strict religious timetable, and he leaves in disgrace. The second job
procured for him by a well-to-do uncle is in a rumshop run by the uncle’s brother. Unfortunately, the
manager, who steals regularly from the business, accuses Mr. Biswas of theft and beats him. This time, Mr.
Biswas quits, resolving to find his own work. When an enterprising friend employs him as an assistant sign
painter, his life is destined to change, for the job takes him to Hanuman House and to the Tulsi family, which
lives there, and against whom he is to fight a life-long battle for a spouse loyal to him, not to them, and for a
house which is his, not theirs.

At the beginning of his campaign against the Tulsis, Mr. Biswas is at a distinct disadvantage. Having been
indiscreet enough to pass a love note to young Shama, he is bullied by the family into a marriage which brings
him no dowry, no house, and no job. Stuffed into a room in Hanuman House, Mr. Biswas is given no respect,
either by his wife or by the relatives who also inhabit the house. Although he has a roof over his head, he feels
homeless. Although he is married, he feels alone. Angrily, he retaliates by insulting the family members,
spitting at them from his window, even throwing food on them. Inevitably, he is beaten and finally sent with
his pregnant wife to live in a shack which functions both as home and shop. At this point, the pattern is set
which is to rule Mr. Biswas’ home life for years. Whenever he quarrels with Shama and whenever she is
about to give birth, she returns home, sometimes for months. Meanwhile, he has no one with whom to share
his worries, and his children grow up hardly knowing their father. In their six years at the shop, Mr. Biswas
fails dismally, at last alienating the community when he employs a lawyer to collect the overdue bills. As a
sub-overseer at another family project, he is the innocent victim of a quarrel between owners and laborers. His
dog is killed, his son Anand Biswas is terrified, and the house he has built is burned.

Finally, Mr. Biswas moves to Port of Spain, becomes a journalist, and for a time feels like the head of his
household, even though he shares a house with his mother-in-law and her remaining son. Gradually, however,
the Tulsis take over, parking lorries in his rose garden and generally assuming ownership, as they have done
no matter where Mr. Biswas has lived. There is another attempt to build a house, but this time Mr. Biswas

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nearly burns down his own house. Back go the Tulsis and Mr. Biswas to the Port of Spain house, which is
now filled with family members who have suddenly decided that they must be educated in city schools. Even
though he becomes a Community Welfare Officer and buys a car, Mr. Biswas is still at the mercy of his
wife’s family, as he discovers when his mother-in-law evicts him to ready the house for her son, who is
returning from England, and brings him back into a single room. Desperate, Mr. Biswas imprudently buys a
poorly built, overpriced house, a purchase which will keep him in debt throughout the rest of his short life and
leave his family without a penny but which enables him at last to claim his wife, his children, and his identity.
While the novel’s prologue had suggested that the Biswas family would lose the house, at the end of the book
the older daughter, Savi Biswas, returns to Port of Spain to earn a living for the family. Although the Tulsis
make their usual destructive raid when they gather for Mr. Biswas’ funeral, the ramshackle house does not
fall before their onslaught, and ironically, after the funeral the Biswas family goes back to Mr. Biswas’
house, which is now empty.

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Summary (Critical Survey of Literature for Students)
Mr. Biswas has been fired from his job as a reporter for the Trinidad Sentinel at a time when he can ill afford
such a misfortune. He has been sick with a protracted illness and is without money. A huge loan that he took
out to buy his present home has to be paid back. Two of his children are still in school; two are abroad on
scholarship. His wife, Shama, may need to seek help from her family, the Tulsi clan.

The narrative shifts to the birth of Mr. Biswas. Dire predictions follow the inauspicious event. Mr. Biswas—his
first name, Mohun, is never used, even in his childhood—is born with six fingers and in the wrong way. The
midwife declares that he will devour his parents, meaning utter ruination for the family. In keeping with
Hindu tradition, a pundit is invited to compose the baby’s astrological chart: He foretells that the boy will
have good teeth but with gaps in between, a sign of lechery, extravagance, and lying.

Bipti, Mr. Biswas’s mother, is warned to keep him away from water in its natural form. Mr. Biswas’s
sneezes, the pundit tells her with strange relish, will spell doom. The pundit says that evil surrounds the boy;
however, much of it will be assuaged if his father does not see him for twenty-one days. The family observes
this injunction; Raghu is turned away when he comes to see the newborn child. Of the ominous possibilities
that the pundit and others predict, many are averted. A few, on the other hand, are strangely fulfilled in Mr.
Biswas’s childhood. Raghu drowns when he dives into a pond because he fears that Mr. Biswas has drowned
in it. Mr. Biswas, meanwhile, has been hiding because he has lost a neighbor’s calf entrusted to his care with
a little sum of money. He shows up by the pond and sneezes just when Raghu’s lifeless body is being
retrieved.

With no means of support, Bipti sells the little hut and land that Raghu left behind and moves her family of
three boys and a daughter from South Trinidad to Pagotes, under the protection of her wealthy sister Tara.
Years later, when Mr. Biswas visits the area, he sees no trace of his former dwelling. Oil has been discovered
on the land that Bipti sold so cheaply, and the area is bustling with drilling activity.

The family splits up in Pagotes. Mr. Biswas’s two older brothers are sent to live with a distant relation and
work in sugar estates. Mr. Biswas lives with Bipti and goes to a local school for six years. His sister Dehuti,
whom he rarely sees, works as a servant for Tara. Tara decides to make a pundit out of Mr. Biswas and sends
him to Jairam to receive the appropriate training, which Mr. Biswas does not enjoy at all. When he eats two
bananas without asking permission, Mr. Biswas is punished by Jairam. The pundit tells him to eat all the
bananas in the big bunch, but Mr. Biswas manages to eat only seven with serious discomfort. The result is
prolonged constipation with unpredictable bowel movements. Mr. Biswas soils himself one night because he
is afraid to go to the outhouse in the dark. He tries to eliminate the evidence by collecting it in a handkerchief
and throwing it as far as he can, but it lands not too far from the window. The following morning, Jairam
discovers the deed and promptly expels him.

Mr. Biswas returns to his mother and receives a cold welcome. For a time, he works in the rum shop of
Tara’s husband, Ajodha; the shop is run by Ajodha’s brother. Soon, Mr. Biswas looks for a job on his own.
He learns sign painting, and it is sign painting that brings him to the storefront of the Tulsis in Arwacas.

Hired to paint the Tulsi store sign, Mr. Biswas shows only a fleeting interest in Shama, one of fourteen Tulsi
daughters, but the event leads Mrs. Tulsi and Seth, Shama’s mother and uncle, to arrange a marriage between
them. Their interest in Mr. Biswas is largely a matter of caste—he is a Brahmin, as they are. Another subtle
reason for the marriage is Mr. Biswas’s depressed social position. The Tulsis want a son-in-law who is
submissive and poses no threat to themselves. They allow their married daughters to live with their husbands
and children in the Tulsi house, known as Hanuman House. The husbands are expected to contribute to the
Tulsis’ wealth in whatever ways they can; in return, they are given room, board, and small sums of money.

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Mr. Biswas fails to meet the conventional Tulsi expectation. It does not take him long to rebel, as he keeps
questioning the authority of Mrs. Tulsi and Seth, the privileged status of the two Tulsi boys Shekhar and
Owad, and the abilities of the other husbands. His financial situation does not permit him to be independent of
the Tulsis, but he dislikes them thoroughly and is quite unabashed in voicing his indelicate opinions.

For the next two decades or so, Mr. Biswas makes several attempts to break free of his Tulsi dependence, but
circumstance does not allow him to succeed until the very end of his life. He departs from Hanuman House a
few times, but only for brief periods. Even during these periods, he works for the Tulsis, either as the manager
of a Tulsi store in another region or as a suboverseer of a Tulsi sugar estate. He builds two houses that are
barely habitable, but he has to build them on Tulsi land; when circumstances dictate, he has to abandon these
houses for other prospects.

Even when in appalling circumstances, Mr. Biswas reads profusely and writes occasionally, growing in mind
and developing psychological mechanisms to cope with the many stresses of his life. Not surprisingly, two of
his favorite authors are Aurelius and Epictetus, stoic philosophers of ancient Greece. Gradually, his attempt to
become self-supporting becomes a reality. He establishes his own career as a journalist for the Trinidad
Sentinel, a profession that immensely satisfies his writerly interests, and he buys a house on Sikkim Street in
Port of Spain. Duped by an unscrupulous seller, a solicitor’s clerk, Mr. Biswas spends a fortune on the
jerry-built house, but he derives solace from the fact that it is on a well-sized lot in a good neighborhood and
has the potential for improvements.

While Mr. Biswas is recovering from the long illness that cost him his job, his daughter Savi returns to
Trinidad after completing her studies abroad. Savi takes up the responsibilities of the family, bringing them a
measure of security. However, just when Mr. Biswas feels with certainty that the loan on the house will
eventually be repaid and he will spend his remaining days in economic security, he dies of a heart attack.

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Summary (Masterpieces of World Literature, Critical
Edition)
A House for Mr. Biswas, the fourth and last of the early novels, is important to the study of Naipaul for
several reasons. Although it resembles its predecessors in that it is set in Trinidad, in this work for the first
time the comic tone becomes more nearly tragicomic. While Naipaul still treats many of the characters
satirically, his protagonist, Mohun Biswas, is likable, even admirable, in his struggle to gain self-respect and
the respect of others and to make enough money to buy his own house. A House for Mr. Biswas is also
important because it is Naipaul’s most autobiographical work, reflecting closely his father’s life and his own
childhood. For this reason, the author comments in his foreword to the 1984 Vintage Books edition of the
work that, of all of his books, this is the one that means the most to him. Naipaul’s critics also place a high
value on the novel. Many of them consider it to be his masterpiece.

Naipaul’s initial chapters generally indicate the theme and the major motifs of his novels. The prologue to A
House for Mr. Biswas is really the end of the story, describing as it does the disastrous ending of Mr.
Biswas’s life, when, at forty-six, the father of four children, penniless, debt-ridden, and ill, he is fired from
his job and lies waiting to die in the ill-constructed house that was his life’s goal.

In the first chapter of A House for Mr. Biswas, as in the prologue to The Suffrage of Elvira, Naipaul uses what
seem like trivial events to set the pattern of the novel. Mohun’s being born backward and having a sixth
finger should not be blamed for his later troubles. It is soon evident, however, that the boy cannot keep his
mind on his business, and through an improbable chain of events, his forgetting to watch a calf indirectly
causes his father’s death, which in turn sentences the family to poverty. As a poor young man, then, Mohun
Biswas later becomes fair game for the predatory Tulsi family, which is always on the lookout for malleable
sons-in-law.

The rest of Mr. Biswas’s short life is spent in search of employment, prosperity, and a home of his own,
where his wife and his children will treat him like the head of the house. Yet he fails in one job after another,
and he also fails to make a home for his family. When he leaves the Tulsis, his wife refuses to go with him;
when he stays with them, he is no more than a shadowy presence, who can assert himself only by sarcasm.
The only relief that Mr. Biswas has from his despair comes in the developing love and loyalty of his son
Anand, and even that is not enough to prevent his ultimate nervous breakdown. Like Seepersad Naipaul, Mr.
Biswas eventually becomes a journalist in Port of Spain. He has, however, no real security. During his brief
residence in the house that he knows is rickety, he looks back on his life, attempting to explain to himself
every disastrous choice that he has made.

The story is tragic, but as the final paragraphs of A House for Mr. Biswas illustrate, Naipaul is writing now
with a new complexity of tone. First, he treats the death of Mr. Biswas with appropriate compassion. Then,
when the Tulsis, his favorite comic characters, invade the house at the time of the funeral, threatening its
immediate collapse, the mood becomes farcical. Yet there is irony in the comedy; one realizes that the
survival of the house, despite the Tulsis, is a symbolic triumph for the deceased. Finally, when Naipaul
describes the return of the family to the empty house, the note is tragic. Naipaul was never again to write a
purely comic novel; instead, he incorporated the comedy as merely one of a number of viewpoints from which
his situations and his characters are to be seen.

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Chapter Summaries
Prologue Summary
The novel begins with the fact that Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist who lived on Sikkim Street in the St.
James district of Port of Spain (the capital of Trinidad and Tobago), was fired from his position at the
Trinidad Sentinel ten weeks before he died. Before his death, he had been ill for quite some time, spending so
long at the hospital and recuperating at his home that, eventually, the paper was forced to let him go, giving
him three months' notice and a complementary lifetime subscription.

At this point in his life, Mr. Biswas is forty-six years old. He and his wife, Shama, have four children. Mr.
Biswas is barely able to afford the interest payment on the mortgage of the house on Sikkim Street where he
and his family live. This, along with the expense of sending his children to school, results in Mr. Biswas
having almost no money. He is, however, glad for one thing: that, after ten years of marriage, his wife no
longer runs to her in-laws (the Tulsis) for money. Instead, she devises a plan to sell potatoes for extra income,
though the plan never comes to fruition.

Despite the immense debt he owes, Mr. Biswas takes great pleasure in the fact that he owns his own house.
The sense of privacy and individualism it gives him is unlike anything in his previous experiences. The house
itself is a strange, two-story design that is mostly comprised of frames from old American Army camps, and is
one of many odd houses that a solicitor's clerk built in his spare time some years before. The floors are linked
by an incredibly inconvenient staircase, and all of the front rooms are virtually uninhabitable during the day
because there is no protection from the sun. As the history of the house is recounted, it becomes clear that
Shama did not agree with the decision to buy the house, and, furthermore, that Mr. Biswas was not aware of
the house's faults until after he had bought it. By the end of his life, however, he and his family have virtually
ceased to notice the house's faults, as it has simply become their house. And when Mr. Biswas returns from
the hospital for the final time, he is overcome by the fact that his house and all of his possessions, from the
kitchen safe to his Slumberking bed, are all part of a world that he somehow made.

Part I, Chapter 1 Summary

Not long before Mr. Biswas is born, his mother, Bipti, and his father, Raghu, have one of their frequent
arguments. Bipti takes her three children and returns to the village where her mother and father live. Bipti's
mother, Bissoondaye, sends for the midwife, who delivers the newborn Mohun Biswas later that night. The
midwife is alarmed because he has been born with six fingers, and she claims that he will eat up his parents.
The next morning the pundit, a local holy man, comes to prophesize about the child's future. He advises that
the child should be kept away from trees and water, and says that he will have an unlucky sneeze.

Although Mr. Biswas' sixth finger simply comes off one night before he is more than two weeks old, many of
the family do start to believe that unlucky things will happen after they hear him sneeze. Raghu, who
reconciles with Bipti after his son's birth, refuses to go to work on any mornings after hearing his son sneeze,
out of fear that something will go wrong. The one day he disregards this rule ends with him returning home
after being injured at work.

As Mr. Biswas gets older, he is unable to join his brothers, Prasad and Pratap, at their job herding the buffalo
to and from the buffalo pond, as he is forbidden to go near water. Mr. Biswas expects that he will go to work
cutting grass and end up working on the local sugarcane estate until he is hired to watch his neighbor's calf
and to take it for walks. One day, while taking the calf for a walk, Mr. Biswas discovers the small stream
where his mother and sister, Dehuti, do the washing on Sundays. He is fascinated by the flowing water and
continues to return to it in the course of his walks with the calf.

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One day, while watching the fish in the stream, Mr. Biswas loses track of the calf. After looking everywhere,
he decides simply to return home and hide until someone else finds the calf. He hides underneath the bed in
his father's room and hears his neighbor, Dhari, ask the family where Mohun and the calf are. Immediately,
the family is concerned, although Dhari is more interested in finding the calf. Everyone thinks Mr. Biswas and
the calf must be in the buffalo pond. Raghu insists that he be the one to dive to the bottom of the pond. After
several long dives, he comes up with the body of the calf. He makes one more dive to look for his son. While
he is under water, the others hear a sneeze and see Mr. Biswas standing on the bank. Another villager jumps
into the pond and brings up Raghu, who is unconscious and dies in the grass beside the pond.

One night after Raghu's funeral, the rest of the family is awakened by Dhari and several other villagers
digging in the yard. They are looking for money that Raghu allegedly buried; they threaten the family that
they will return every night. Bipti has no choice but to leave the family hut. She finds a place for Dehuti,
working as a servant for her sister Tara. She and Mr. Biswas find a place to live with some relatives of Tara's
husband, while Prasad and Pratap are sent to live and work full-time on the sugarcane estate.

Part I, Chapter 2 Summary

After Mohun Biswas moves to Pagotes with his mother and sister, he finds out that he must have a birth
certificate to continue taking classes at the Canadian Mission School. His mother and aunt take him to see the
solicitor F. Z. Ghany, who completes the necessary paperwork and allows Mr. Biswas to return to school.

As a student, Mr. Biswas learns a number of speeches in English as well as geography, arithmetic, and
history. He befriends another boy at school, Alec, from whom he learns the art of sign painting.

Although no one in his family is very well off, Mr. Biswas is treated quite well whenever his aunt, Tara, has a
feast for one of the many religious festivals. As a Brahmin, he is waited on by his sister (who works as a
servant in Tara's house) and given gifts of money. As soon as he leaves the feast, though, he immediately
returns to the small shack he shares with his mother.

At this time, Biswas also begins to read a weekly newspaper column to Tara's husband, Ajodha. Tara sees that
he shows promise as a potential pundit, a kind of Hindu wise man, and takes him out of school to apprentice
him to Jairam, the local pundit.

As Jairam's assistant, Mr. Biswas helps him with the various duties involved in his office, including assisting
in the religious ceremonies, counting the gifts given to Jairam, and doing the puja for Jairam's household.

On one occasion, Jairam is given a large bunch of bananas. Mohun is unable to resist the temptation and one
day while Jairam and his wife are out, he eats two of the bananas. When Jairam notices, he teaches Mohun a
lesson by making him eat every last one of the bananas, which results in a swelled stomach that troubles him
for the rest of his life.

Not long after that, Mr. Biswas completely destroys his relationship with Jairam by improperly using and then
disposing of an unclean handkerchief, which results in Jairam chasing him away.

After Mr. Biswas returns to Pagotes in disgrace, Tara finds him a job working in a rumshop owned by
Ajodha's brother, Bhandat. Before long, Bhandat accuses Mohun (who is innocent) of stealing from him and
strikes his face with his belt. Although Bhandat apologizes, Mr. Biswas refuses to return to work at the
rumshop and decides he will set out on his own and look for a job.

At first, he is unable to locate any work and becomes discouraged. One day, however, he runs into his old
friend Alec, who convinces Mr. Biswas to come and work with him as a sign painter, the one trade for which
Mohun has shown a real aptitude.

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Part I, Chapter 3 Summary
After he gains some experience designing and painting signs, Mr. Biswas takes a job at Hanuman House in
the town of Arwacas. Hanuman House is home to both the Tulsi store and the Tulsi family, one of the most
prominent families in the region.

The patriarch of the family, Pundit Tulsi, was killed in a car accident some years before, but not before he
amassed quite a bit of money. There was, in fact, some speculation about the origin of his fortune as he was
not a laborer and still maintained relations with his family in India, which made him different from almost
everyone else in the Indian community of Trinidad.

His daughter, Mrs. Tulsi, and her brother-in-law Seth are now the primary managers of the Tulsi family estate
and fortune, and they are the ones who hire Mr. Biswas to paint the signs for Hanuman House.

As he works, Mr. Buswas begins to take a special interest in Shama, one of Mrs. Tulsi's daughters who, like
the other women in the family, helps around the shop. After exchanging glances with her for several days, Mr.
Biswas decides to write her a note, which he leaves on the counter for her to find.

Before she can read it, however, Shama gets caught up in a dispute with one of the customers, who thinks
Shama is trying to play a trick on her. Mrs. Tulsi tries to appease the customer, pacifying her by giving her a
free pair of stockings, but she ends up seeing the note Mr. Biswas left for Shama.

Before he leaves for the day, Seth tells Mohun that Mrs. Tulsi wants to see him. At first, he is afraid she will
chastise and perhaps fire him, but instead she asks about his family and whether he has thought about getting
married. The next day, Mrs. Tulsi invites him to eat lunch with her and, by the end of the meal, Mr. Biswas
agrees to marry Shama.

Although his mother is very happy, Mr. Biswas begins to have doubts; he realizes that he was only chosen for
Shama because he is a Brahmin and that the Tulsis have no intention of providing him with a dowry.
Furthermore, he realizes that marriage to Shama means that he will, in effect, become a Tulsi and be expected
to work for the family, something that depresses him greatly.

After Mr. Biswas marries Shama, he begins living at Hanuman House. His fears of being unhappy and of
being an overlooked member of the Tulsi family come to pass. He argues with Mrs. Tulsi and Seth, he is
disrespected by the children in the house, and he complains that Shama rarely takes his side.

He tries to fill his time by making other friends in the community, but this only serves to alienate him further
from the Tulsis. After he gets in yet another fight with the Tulsi family, Seth tells him that he and Shama have
been given control of an old shop in a village called The Chase. It is essentially in the middle of nowhere and
the prospects for making a profit are not very good, but Mr. Biswas considers it a triumph: he and Shama will
have some amount in independence from the rest of the Tulsi family.

Part I, Chapter 4 Summary

Mr. Biswas and Shama, who is now pregnant, move to The Chase, a rural village in the middle of the
sugarcane fields, to run a small food shop. They live at the back of the shop in two small rooms with mud
walls and a floor of beaten earth.

Although Seth has heard that a new road eventually will be built through The Chase, bringing the shop new
business, this never comes to pass and the store remains mostly unprofitable. After they settle in, Shama
makes a meal in the small kitchen in the yard. Although their surroundings and prospects are somewhat
depressing, Mr. Biswas takes some satisfaction in eating a meal prepared in a house that is his own.

10
After they establish the business, Mr. Biswas and Shama have the rest of the Tulsi family out for a
house-blessing ceremony. Despite Shama's best efforts, Mr. Biswas ends up quarreling with some of the Tulsi
chidren and Mrs. Tulsi, which leads to another fight between Mohun and Shama.

When Shama returns to Hanuman House for her confinement, Mr. Biswas continues to argue with the Tulsis.
He refuses to let the baby keep the name Seth decided on, Basso, and changes the birth certificate himself to
Lakshmi, although the baby girl is referred to as Savi.

After Mr. Biswas returns to The Chase, he is visited by a man named Moti, who appears to be some kind of
clerk. Moti asks Mohun if he knows L. S. Seebaran, who according to Moti is a very strict Hindu and one of
the best lawyers around.

Moti asks Mohun if he has many customers who owe him. Mr. Biswas has, in fact, extended credit to many
people, which is one of the main reasons he is in debt. One man in particular, Mungroo, owes Mr. Biswas
quite a bit of money, but Biswas is afraid to approach him because he is a renowned stick fighter.

Moti tells him that Seebaran easily can fix the situation. He returns a few days later and says Seebaran gladly
will take the case as soon as Mr. Biswas gives him an advance. A few days after that, Moti returns to tell him
the case is going well except that Mungroo's lawyer has filed a suit against Mr. Biswas for damaging
Mungroo's reputation.

At Seebaran's advice, Mr. Biswas settles out of court by paying Mungroo a substantial fee to drop the case.
Only later does he realize that the whole thing was a scam set up by Seebaran, Moti and Mungroo's lawyer.

After yet another quarrel, Shama returns to Hanuman House for the birth of their third child (their second
child, Anand, was a boy). At this point, he realizes the shop in The Chase will never succeed. At Hanuman
House, Mrs. Tulsi is very ill; when Shama and Mr. Biswas go to see her, they end up talking about their future
with her and Seth.

Eventually, Seth decides that the best plan is to try the "insure and burn" strategy. Seth says that everyone will
blame Mungroo for anything bad that happens; therefore it is a foolproof plan. Mr. Biswas is instructed to
return to The Chase, alert the police to his encounters with Mungroo, and then burn down the shop.

11
Source: eNotes Publishing, ©2015 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.

Source: Masterpieces of American Fiction, ©2000 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Critical Guide to British Fiction, ©1987 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Critical Survey of Literature for Students, ©2010 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Masterpieces of World Literature, Critical Edition, ©2009 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
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12
Themes

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Themes
Themes and Meanings (Masterpieces of American Fiction)
The primary theme of the novel is the search for a stable sense of personal identity, symbolized by the house
for which Mr. Biswas is continually searching. Until he attains his own house, a firm structure within which
he can seek his own destiny, he is a faceless man, adrift on the tides of life. This theme of self-knowledge, or
the lack of it, is brought out early in the novel, when Mr. Biswas tries to discover why his food shop is
unsuccessful. He studies his face in a mirror and asks Shama who he is, based on his face. She cannot answer,
and he says, “I don’t look like anything at all. Shopkeeper, lawyer, doctor, labourer, overseer—I don’t look
like any of them.” Mr. Biswas worries frequently about falling into a void, a place where there is no structure,
no basis for living. Throughout the novel, inner and outer reality reflect each other. His stark realization that
he is not whole, for example, shortly precedes the destruction of his house at Green Vale. It is because of the
symbolic value that a house possesses, as the external embodiment of an internal value, that the houses in
which Mr. Biswas lives are described in intricate detail throughout the novel.

The theme of a search for identity reveals the influence of William Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1606). The
novel’s prologue refers to the “unnecessary and unaccommodated” conditions of Mr. Biswas’s birth, an
echo of Lear’s lament for “unaccommodated man”; Mr. Biswas’s fear of the void echoes a theme of King
Lear in which everything seems to be collapsing into “nothing”; and the centrally placed storm scene that
destroys Mr. Biswas’s house recalls the storm scene in the play. Also, King Lear is replete with animal
imagery, an indication of the barbaric state of nature into which civilization is falling. In the novel, Hanuman
House is named after the monkey-god of Hindu scripture, and Mr. Biswas refers to it in terms of many
different animals, at one point calling it “a blasted zoo.” With its quarrels, back-bitings, disloyalties, harsh
discipline, and clannishness, Hanuman House represents a badly flawed communal life, a devouring swamp
from which Mr. Biswas must extricate himself in order to achieve his own selfhood. That he succeeds is
indicated by two moments of grace at the close of the novel. The first is when the sweet-smelling flowers of a
laburnum tree he had planted fill the house, giving nature’s blessing to his troubled enterprise. The second
comes when Savi, his daughter, returns at the last minute and saves him from debt, which he interprets as an
act of providence.

13
Themes and Meanings (Critical Guide to British Fiction)
In A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul presents two sharply opposing views of life. For the Tulsi family, life is
immersion in a community, which governs behavior and prescribes emotions. There is no need for a separate
identity in the Tulsi household. Children squabble, husbands and wives quarrel, people move in and out, but
everything remains the same. All the Tulsis eat the same bad food on ordinary days, the same lavish food on
holidays. All the Tulsis move to a new area at the same time. All the Tulsis develop a passion for education at
the same time. Their insistence on conformity is illustrated by their observation of Christmas; all the children
receive the same presents, which they break at about the same time.

Although he has never formulated his view of life, from the moment of his unusual birth Mr. Biswas has
thought for himself and made his own decisions. It is unfortunate that so often they have been disastrous. Had
he not been so busy contemplating the fish, he might not have caused both the calf which he was supposed to
watch and his own father to drown. Later, every time he strikes out for himself, whether in building or buying
a house or in managing a store, he seems to make the wrong decision—not one which a fool makes but one
which could just as well have been right. If he had never become a sign painter, he would not have become
involved with the Tulsis; if it had not rained, he would have inspected the poorly built house more carefully.
Between destiny and the Tulsis, he seems to be doomed. Even his attempt to make Christmas a special
occasion for his children fails. Impulsively, he spends all of his money on a dollhouse for Savi, his oldest
child; once again, however, things go wrong. Anand is upset, and because his father has no more money, he
must wait until the next payday for his present; the Tulsi tribe is upset, and therefore Shama is upset; finally,
Shama destroys the dollhouse in order to placate her family, upsetting Savi and infuriating Mr. Biswas.

Yet if one would be an individual, clearly one must imitate Mr. Biswas, rather than his wife. His ambition to
own something derives not from an acquisitive instinct but rather from a creative desire. If he died, Mr.
Biswas thinks early in the novel, nothing of him would remain. Nowhere has he been more than a guest;
nothing would cause people to remember him. Occasionally he tries to write a story but always he abandons
it. At last it is the house which he knows will outlast him. Admittedly, he must settle for less than the ideal not
immortality, but a few years. Still, that is better than being nothing but a carbon copy, like the Tulsis.

14
Social Concerns / Themes
While there is much humor in A House for Mr Biswas, the dominant tone of the novel is melodramatic, even
tragic. The novel presents the struggle for identity for an Indian in Trinidad whose agrarian values are
challenged by Western cultural influences when he moves to the city. Mohun Biswas must reconcile the
apparently contradictory values and traditions of East and West, and forge an authentic self in relation to both
family and society. This quest is not simply a recognition of some inner traits, but rather the gradual unfolding
of choices made within the context of new situations, restraints, and sources of fulfillment. Mohun's journey is
from an agrarian village ruled by the whimsies of a Hindu pundit to the towns of Trinidad and finally to Port
of Spain. During the course of this journey he becomes a herder, acolyte to a pundit, sign painter, store owner,
overseer, welfare worker, and journalist.

However, Mohun's career changes are not the primary focus of A House for Mr Biswas; the most important
changes in the novel involve the changing nature of family relationships. Thinking that his son's body is
submerged in a stream, Raghu, Mohun's father, dives for it, and, in his rescue attempt, drowns. His death
breaks up the family; Mohun's older brothers and mother go to work as farm help, while Mohun finishes his
education and serves Pundit Jairam before rebelling and becoming a sign painter. Work, though, is of lesser
importance to Mohun than learning to live as a poor relation to his Aunt Tara and later as a son-in-law of the
powerful Tulsi family. Defining his place among these families is especially important to Mohun.

The house in Naipaul's title thus becomes significant; it is the site and symbol of Mohun's independence and
familial responsibility. Creating a home is an essential part of Mohun's development; but it must also satisfy
the needs of his wife Shama, his son Anand, and his daughter Savi. In each house where Mohun lives as a
dependent, the families with whom he lives have different responses to traditional culture and religion and the
accommodation to Western values, religion, and standards of personal success. Just as these houses pose
cultural dilemmas for Mohun, so too do the houses he builds, buy, or rents.

15
Source: Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction, ©2001 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full
copyright.

Source: Masterpieces of American Fiction, ©2000 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Critical Guide to British Fiction, ©1987 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.

For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work.

16
Characters

©2015 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document.

Characters
The Characters (Masterpieces of American Fiction)
The novel has a full complement of richly developed characters, from the overbearing Seth to the conniving
and later self-pitying Mrs. Tulsi and the pompous W. C. Tuttle, and a host of minor ones, each deftly
presented and revealed by the habitual gesture or facial expression, the characteristic pattern of thought and
speech. On the whole, it is not a flattering portrait of Indian life in Trinidad. The Tulsi family and others
reveal more than their fair share of vanity, snobbishness, bullying, callousness, resignation, pettiness, and
knavery.

The central character, Mr. Biswas, emerges as a sympathetic figure in spite of his faults. This is partly because
of the adverse circumstances of his life, which he does not accept and continually makes efforts to overcome.
Mr. Biswas is always the “little man”; physically weak and small, he is dependent on others economically
and socially; he is humiliated by them and cannot win any respect even in the family into which he marries.
As a result, he hits back by making them the butt of his scathing humor, which lowers his stock even more.
Ironically, the most respect Mr. Biswas receives is from the destitutes and villagers with whom he comes into
contact as a result of his work as a journalist. He realizes, though, that there is a huge discrepancy between the
way they regard him and what he feels to be the depressing truth of his own precarious existence, and this
self-awareness produces some of the most hilarious episodes in the novel.

Mr. Biswas’s relationship with his wife Shama is for much of the novel one of contempt and mutual
incomprehension. They are bound to each other not through love but necessity; there are periods when,
following a quarrel, Shama returns to live at Hanuman House for months at a time. The result of these
separations is that Mr. Biswas’s children grow up distant from him, although he does eventually succeed in
forming a bond with Anand, who refuses to leave his father alone at Green Vale.

Shama herself is long-suffering and has a sarcastic wit of her own, but she cannot comprehend her husband’s
desire for independence from the Tulsis. She is far more conventional and would have been content to live her
life in the time-honored way of the Tulsi women. The passage of time does bring some accommodation,
however, and in his final years, Mr. Biswas comes to respect Shama’s judgment and her optimism.

17
The Characters (Critical Guide to British Fiction)
One of V. S. Naipaul’s achievements is his ability to create characters who are irrational and eccentric, yet
thoroughly believable and sympathetic. Usually, whether he writes in the first person or in the third person, he
presents his narrative through the eyes of a single character, in this case Mr. Biswas. Usually, too, the novel
involves gradual development of understanding, even a gradual initiation into life.

In this novel, Naipaul details the growth of Mr. Biswas, first a dreamy child, too young even to feel guilt for
his father’s death, then an innocent boy, whose desire for a girlfriend leads him into the Tulsis’ trap, finally a
long-suffering husband and father, endeavoring to “claim” his own wife and children. Like many of
Naipaul’s protagonists, Mr. Biswas has tragic possibilities. Although life seems determined to destroy him, or
at least to submerge him in his wife’s family, he always fights back, whether by insulting them or by defying
them. No matter that the defiance is useless, that his children finally keep the names which the Tulsis gave
them rather than those Mr. Biswas had chosen, or that his wife inevitably finds an excuse to return to her
family whenever he has taken her and the children away from them, it is the little man’s determination which
makes him admirable. If he wins only to die, that too is tragic.

One of Mr. Biswas’ problems is the kind of woman he married. So much a part of her family is Shama that
she constructs her entire life on their pattern. Keeping house, she relies on Tulsi recipes; pregnant, she imitates
Tulsi behavior. As Naipaul comments, “there was no doubt that this was what Shama expected from life: to
be taken through every stage, to fulfill every function, to have her share of the established emotions.... Life, to
be full, had to be this established pattern of sensations.” To a woman so programmed, Mr. Biswas is not a
person but a generic husband, and his desire for a separate identity is incomprehensible. She is happiest when
in the midst of a family, acting out the roles which she sees her sisters acting.

There are a number of characters less fully developed, yet clearly recognizable, from the inconsistent pundit at
the beginning of the book to the self-important, briefly Communistic doctor near the end. Yet Naipaul’s skill
in revealing character without making explicit comments can be illustrated by the scene at Green Vale when
Shama is once again about to leave her husband. For the first time, Anand stays with his father. Puzzled, Mr.
Biswas assumes that Anand wanted crayons or some other material object, but Anand denies such motivation.
He stayed, he says, angry at himself and at his father, “Because they was going to leave you alone.” The
complexity of emotion suggested by Naipaul’s words, the pity and love of Anand for his father, and Anand’s
anger with himself for feeling pity and anger with his father for inspiring it do not need further explanation.
The boy’s character is consistent. At the end of the novel, Anand both wishes and does not wish to come
home; finally, he does not.

18
Characters Discussed (Great Characters in Literature)
Mohun Biswas

Mohun Biswas, a journalist. When he is born backward, equipped with a sixth finger, he is marked for bad
luck. A small, thin boy, he is dreamy and naïve. After growing up in poverty, he has a succession of jobs.
During a stint as a sign painter, he is tricked into marrying a member of the possessive Tulsi family. During
the rest of his life, he tries to wean his wife from her family and to live in his own home without the Tulsis.
When he is forty-two years old, he realizes both dreams, but four years later, he dies of heart disease.

Shama Tulsi Biswas

Shama Tulsi Biswas, Mohun’s wife. When he meets her, she is sixteen years old, pretty, and slim, with fine
features and a nice smile. Unfortunately, after she marries Mohun, she remains a Tulsi and does not fall
completely into the role of wife. When he lives with the Tulsis, she treats him with disrespect; when she lives
elsewhere with him, she seizes every excuse to return home, often for months. When he takes her and their
family to the house he has bought, she finally learns to love and respect him.

Raghu Biswas

Raghu Biswas, Mohun’s father. A man obsessed with saving money, he hides his horde so well that his
family can never find it. Thinking that Mohun has fallen into a pond, he dives for him and drowns, leaving his
wife penniless, with four children to support.

Bipti Biswas

Bipti Biswas, Mohun’s mother. A shy woman, she becomes broken and helpless after the death of her
husband leaves her in poverty.

Tara

Tara, Bipti’s older sister. She shows her wealth by adorning herself lavishly with gold and silver jewelry. A
decent but domineering woman, she takes responsibility for her widowed sister, taking in her oldest niece and
supporting, as well as managing, the rest of the family. It is she who pulls Mohun out of school for his
unsuccessful apprenticeship to a pundit.

Mai Tulsi

Mai Tulsi, Shama’s mother. A dignified, thin-lipped woman who speaks very proper English, she has trained
her large family to reflect her opinions on every matter and to obey her commands without thinking. She is
Mohun’s antagonist in the battle for his wife and his children.

Govind

Govind, the husband of one of Shama’s sisters. Unlike Mohun, he endures the dominion of the Tulsis, joins
them in mocking Mohun, and beats him, driving him out of the household. When Govind finally beats his
own disobedient wife, he acquires her respect, as well as that of the rest of the family.

Savi Biswas

19
Savi Biswas, the oldest child of Mohun and Shama. Born at the Tulsi home, she is named by the Tulsis and
reared largely by them. When she sings publicly, however, she discovers that the Tulsis can be spitefully
jealous of anyone who surpasses the cousins. After Mohun’s death, Savi returns from school abroad to
support her mother. Ironically, she finds a job paying more than Mohun ever made.

Anand Biswas

Anand Biswas, Mohun and Shama’s son, three years younger than Savi. Despite the fact that he spends much
of his childhood with the Tulsis, he identifies with his father, adopting Mohun’s contemptuous attitude
toward the Tulsi family. Sensing his father’s loneliness, at one point Anand chooses to stay with him.
Rebellious laborers burn them out, and Anand never recovers from the terror of that experience and from his
resulting anger at his father. When Mohun is dying, Anand promises to come home, but he does not come.

20
Characters
Characters in A House for Mr Biswas can be viewed in relation to the clash between traditional Indian culture
and Western values. Mohun responds to them in terms of his need for survival and independence, and the
claims and counterclaims they make for traditional Indian culture.

As a child among his relatives, Mohun Biswas responds with love and guilt to his mother, Bipti, who can
provide warmth but no protection, comfort but no answers to his questions. Tara, his maternal aunt, can
provide protection and physical comfort, but only at the cost of his obedience to traditional culture.

The education that should lead Mohun to the traditional life approved by his aunt, instead provides him with
skills for life in the city. To him Hindu ceremonies appear empty; he is drawn to a Western view of work,
painting, calculating, and the Christian weighing of choice and motive.

The most difficult people for Mohun to deal with are the Tulsis, who are alternately Christian or Hindu,
depending upon the situation. Allowing himself to be trapped into a dowry-less marriage to Shama is
Biswas’s greatest error. He allows himself to be manipulated by the Tulsi family overseer, Seth, and by his
mother-in-law, Mrs. Tulsi, a strong woman who seeks domination in terms of traditional culture and success
in Western terms. While Mrs. Tulsi uses her faith to rule the family, she sends her sons to Christian schools
for their education. Although the Tulsi homes provide a kind of sustenance and security for Mohun, he
continually revolts, either by clowning and caricaturing the home's power structure, or by his plan to create his

own home. Once Mohun's children are born, however, he must achieve freedom not only for himself but for
his family. The Tulsis, even more than his Aunt Tara, succeed in Western ways. The old religion and caste
structure are irrelevant to success in the towns and cities. There, education and the acquisition of property are
the roads to freedom.

Even on these terms Mohun knows that his possibilities are limited. Work as a newspaperman or as welfare
worker is as high as he can practically aspire, and he sees the family's only hope as residing in his children.
While Mohun attempts to fashion a life between East and West, his children will succeed in Western terms.
Europe, not Trinidad, is the only secure measuring rod.

If, as some critics have speculated, Mohun's son, Anand, is the implied narrator, A House for Mr Biswas can
be seen as a means for Naipaul to come to terms with a part of his past. Mohun provides the cultural
mediation necessary for his son's development in another culture much as Naipaul's own father did for him.

The house, then, frail and a swindle, is only a temporary claim to a life of achievement, a house of cards ready
to topple at the universe's slightest quiver. Anand will not live in his father's house; he will not return from
England but will live abroad in a still more foreign land.

21
Source: Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction, ©2001 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full
copyright.

Source: Masterpieces of American Fiction, ©2000 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Critical Guide to British Fiction, ©1987 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Great Characters in Literature, ©1998 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.

For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work.

22
Critical Essays

©2015 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document.

Critical Essays
Critical Context (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series)
A House for Mr. Biswas was Naipaul’s fourth novel, following The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of
Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (1959). All four are set in Trinidad. A House for Mr. Biswas is usually
considered the finest of these novels and one of the masterpieces of comic writing to appear since World War
II.

The model for Mr. Biswas was Naipaul’s own father, Seepersad Naipaul, and there are numerous parallels
between events in Seepersad’s life and that of the fictional Mr. Biswas. For example, Seepersad worked as a
sign painter, became a journalist on a Trinidad newspaper, and died of a heart attack at the age of forty-six (as
does Mr. Biswas). Some events in the novel draw on Naipaul’s own experiences as a child.

Apart from its comic verve and its masterful interweaving of plot, character, and imagery to create a unified
work of art, the novel is important because of its authentic portrayal of Indian life in colonial Trinidad, a
culture that had hardly been portrayed in earlier literature. The novel also creates a picture of the changes this
culture underwent over a fifty-year period and shows how these were linked to wider historical events.
However, although it is set firmly in a particular place and time, the importance of the novel rests ultimately
on the universality of its theme: the struggle of an ordinary man to carve out a place for himself in the face of
the absurdity of life, its unwillingness to bend itself to the demands of human will.

23
Critical Context (Critical Guide to British Fiction)
A House for Mr. Biswas is the final book in Naipaul’s Trinidad group, including Miguel Street (1959), The
Mystic Masseur (1957), and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958). Although they are too masterful to be called
apprenticeship novels, they do have a zest for life and a comic tone less evident in the later works, both fiction
and nonfiction, whose theme is frequently that of the destruction of social order in the postimperialistic world,
along with the resulting displacement and violence.

This novel is also significant in that in the foreword to the 1983 edition, Naipaul called it his “most personal
book, created out of what I saw and felt as a child,” including “some of my funniest writing.” Mr. Biswas,
Naipaul comments, is a man like his own father, attempting to make something from his simple life last. In
the complex and troubled Anand, it may be supposed, Naipaul may have placed both his own capacity for
sympathy and his artistic detachment.

24
Critical Evaluation
East Indians in Trinidad were transplanted from India primarily during the nineteenth century to work on
sugar plantations. Few of them had any education or wealth when they came to the island as indentured
laborers. They formed a close-knit group, had little interest in anything other than their own affairs, and
aggressively competed with the other dominant ethnic group, the Africans, for perks and prospects.

One of V. S. Naipaul’s early fictions dealing with the Hindu community in Trinidad, A House for Mr. Biswas
is an autobiographical fiction. It tells the story of Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, an unsuccessful writer
and reformer, in the guise of Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas’s son, Anand, represents the author himself.

Insofar as A House for Mr. Biswas recounts a man’s growth to maturity, it is a bildungsroman; insofar as it
describes a writer’s quest to find his true voice, as depicted in the experience of both Mr. Biswas and Anand,
the novel is a künstlerroman. It also resembles a family romance, though not in the strict Freudian sense: The
rebel is not the son, Anand—though he, too, has his rebellious moments—but the son-in-law, Mr. Biswas, who
continually threatens the power hierarchy of the Tulsi family.

Naipaul would use the autobiographical elements he incorporated into A House for Mr. Biswas again and
again in his later books, creating a unique genre in the process. This new mode of writing richly culminated in
The Enigma of Arrival (1987), which was cited by the Nobel Committee when it awarded the author the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. Fiction forms a component in Naipaul’s distinctive genre, which is largely
a combination of autobiography, history, and travel writing and borders on nonfiction.

Although the Trinidad Indians seem to be an enduring source for Naipaul, his own attitude toward the island
nation is ambivalent at best. In a biography of the author, Patrick French recounts Naipaul’s long ordeal to rid
himself of all Trinidadian “taint.” French recalls Naipaul’s comment upon receiving the Nobel Prize,
acknowledging the prize as an honor to England and India without mentioning Trinidad. There was a reason
for the omission. In the vast stretches of the British Empire, the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, islands
comprising an area of less than 2,000 square miles, was merely a dot and provided few opportunities for
advancement. In the novel, Mr. Biswas’s failure to be a successful writer owes much to the social processes
at work in colonial Trinidad. Anand can seek a better future only abroad. He wins a scholarship to leave the
island, but he pays a heavy price. He can barely respond to his father’s cries for help in the concluding pages
of A House for Mr. Biswas. Presumably, he is fighting his own battle in England.

A House for Mr. Biswas shows that life is a struggle whose triumphs are few and ill-timed. While a hostile
environment contributes to Mr. Biswas’s misery, some of his suffering originates in his own frailties. For
example, when he is down on his luck, he abuses his own family. Once, he kicks Shama when she is pregnant
with Kamla, risking a miscarriage. Mr. Biswas beats Anand frequently and sometimes seriously, as when a
milk glass Mr. Biswas throws at his son narrowly misses an eye. The incident is based on the author’s
experience, as Naipaul recalls in Finding the Center: Two Narratives (1984). Mr. Biswas is also complicit in
Seth’s scheme to insure then burn down a property to recoup losses on a bad business venture.

Mr. Biswas’s flaws do not demonize him; rather, they emphasize his Everyman qualities, and Naipaul
succeeds in giving the futility of his circumstance an existential dimension. It is not hard to see the root cause
of Mr. Biswas’s problem: He is a misfit in the world he inhabits. As a result, men such as Seth and Owad can
rise in that world in ways that Mr. Biswas can never emulate. Seth can bribe legal officials when the situation
warrants such an action. No door is closed to him because he has figured out how the system works in
Trinidad. Blessed with a huge family fortune, Owad can go abroad and return with a medical degree and
mistreat his sisters’ children and other relations with impunity. Mr. Biswas, by contrast, can survive in
society only minimally and with little advancement and can do so only by sheer inner strength, which often

25
manifests in his comic denial of the overwhelming reality engulfing him. When that power fails, he suffers
breakdowns.

A House for Mr. Biswas features a protagonist who raises profound questions regarding one’s place in the
universe and tells its story in a matchless style that injects wit and comedy into an essentially tragic view of
humanity. The novel was recognized as a masterpiece immediately upon its publication. It is a foundational
text in postcolonial literature. Naipaul’s later interests turned to travel writing and nonfiction. Because of the
opinions they express, the merit of these works is a matter of fierce debate among scholars. About the
excellence of A House for Mr. Biswas, however, there is no controversy; it continues to receive a great deal of
critical attention.

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Source: Masterpieces of American Fiction, ©2000 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Critical Guide to British Fiction, ©1987 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Critical Survey of Literature for Students, ©2010 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.

For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work.

27
Analysis

©2015 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document.

Analysis
Techniques / Literary Precedents
Two radically different novelistic traditions have influenced A House for Mr Biswas: the nineteenth-century
English social novel, with its focus on an individual life story amid a large cast of characters, and the
existential novels of Camus, particularly The Stranger (1942). Camus, an Algerian in France and a Frenchman
in Algeria, poignantly describes the lack of connection between cultural traditions, beliefs, and life. Naipaul, a
dispossessed Indian in Trinidad, and a dispossessed colonial in England, experienced a similar difficulty
charting a life among traditions that seem alien to him. Just as the existentialists tried to force an answer to the
absurdity of life through personal choice and willed behavior, Mohun tries to build a home that challenges his
life's absurdity. The house is less important as a structure than as an idea and symbol of emotional
commitment. For Naipaul a colonized culture with a diverse immigrant ethnic population is a natural
absurdity. In such a situation individual lives are deformed by a combination of bankrupt immigrant traditions
and colonized social expectations.

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Related Titles
A House for Mr Biswas is a more mature and assured work than Naipaul's earlier novels, which are lighter in
tone and more comic. Part of the reason for the complexity of A House for Mr Biswas is its narrative point of
view. Although the narration is in the third person, the "Prologue" and "Epilogue" have a more personal
quality, almost as if Anand were telling the story. Unlike Naipaul's earlier novels where the comedy is
external, the comic element in A House for Mr Biswas is more internal and connected to the title character.
The comic humiliations of Mohun are both funny and sad. As Mohun moves from an extended to a nuclear
family, from country to city, from a traditional culture to Western values, one is not certain whether to
applaud his individuality or to laugh at him and censure his selfishness. He is comic butt, comic clown,
melodramatic victim, and, at times, a tragic hero.

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Bibliography (Masterpieces of American Fiction)
Feroza, Jussawalla, ed. Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. A
collection of twenty-two interviews, spanning thirty-six years. Includes revealing comments about the
circumstances under which A House for Mr. Biswas was written.

Hamner, Robert D. V. S. Naipaul. New York: Twayne, 1973. An analysis of the structural framework and
techniques of each of Naipaul’s first eight novels.

Hughes, Peter. V. S. Naipaul. New York: Routledge, 1988. A reading that examines the innovative rather than
traditional aspects of Naipaul’s novels and discusses how the novels can be illuminated by modern literary
theory.

King, Bruce. V. S. Naipaul. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Discusses A House for Mr. Biswas in terms
of Naipaul’s recurring themes of the violence and purposelessness of life, the comic manner of the novel
notwithstanding.

Theroux, Paul. V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. New York: Africana, 1972. Organized around
Naipaul’s themes, this includes chapters on creation, fantasy, marriage and householders, rootlessness and
travel, a sense of the past, and freedom.

30
Source: Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction, ©2001 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full
copyright.

Source: Masterpieces of American Fiction, ©2000 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.

For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work.

31