Two central themes of V. S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas are the absurdity of human desire and the diminished scope of the modern Western bourgeois experience.
It is correct to say, as it is often said, that the protagonist's most acute desire is for a home. But Naipaul complicates this desire by repeatedly depicting the crucial—and tragicomic—difference between the desire for a house and the desire for a home. Mr. Biswas desires both, and he keeps trying to find a sense of home by associating that sense with an actual house. But the houses he lives in are all failures. His childhood home, a mud hut, is a space of deprivation and fear. The Tulsi house is characterized by an oppressive tedium that is almost suggestive of death. And the house that he finally obtains for his own family is a pathetic shambles.
The desire for a home can never match up with the desire to own a house. The former is a vast, insatiable longing; the latter can be satisfied, though only in a way that ironically connotes no corresponding sense of satisfaction. The epic longing for home that, in Western literature, is associated with the Homeric Ulysses is, in this novel, anatomized and shown to be a mixture of a bourgeois wish for the pride of possession as well as a deep and moving longing for a place in the world.
One of Mohun Biswas's most cherished dreams is to build a house of his own. Mr. Biswas was raised in a simple mud hut and has since led an itinerant lifestyle, moving around from place to place without ever feeling truly settled. It's not surprising, then, that a home of his own is a very important goal in his life.
Mr. Biswas makes a number of attempts to build his own house, but all end in failure due to extreme weather conditions and fire. It seems as if he will never make his dream come true. But one day, almost on the spur of the moment, he buys a dilapidated old house from a solicitor's clerk. It's not much, but it's a place he can finally call home.
I'd like to suggest that Mr. Biswas's quest for a place of his own is symbolic of his native Trinidad's struggle for independence, which is the main theme of the story. As with all anti-colonial struggles, Mr. Biswas encounters a number of setbacks in his attempts to lead an independent life. And even when he finally does obtain a place of his own, it's quite a rickety old structure, requiring a lot of hard work to make it tolerably habitable. So it was with the independence of Trinidad, or indeed any former colony. Once freedom had finally been achieved, then the hard work really started.
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