Biswas" portrays through a series of homes he had and fairly brief life of a poor journalist turned civil servant in Port of Spain Trinidad, in the years before and after World War II. Born into an Indian family whose father worked in the sugar cane estates, Mr. Biswas, as he is called by the author from infancy on, becomes a sigh painter, and at the age of sixteen, is tricked into marrying Shama, the daughter of the large and powerful Tulsi family. The choice of the protagonist’s name in A House for Mr. Biswas is also interesting. Naipaul seems to have carefully chosen this name. His aim, I would argue, is not only to depict the Hindu background but also to relate it to the circumstances in which he is living. For instance, the protagonist’s First name is Mohun, which means ‘beloved’ (according to the novel), even though he is depicted as an individual who is branded as unlucky and who Experiences hostility and humiliation from society. Similarly, his surname, Biswas, means …show more content…
How terrible it would have been, he thinks, to have failed in this quest, “to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated”. In the long search for this accommodation – the what and why having been answered in the prologue, the novel’s course is about the how – Mr Biswas finds various lesser stratagems in which he can be temporarily housed. It begins with his name: not the “Mohun Biswas” inscribed belatedly on his birth certificate by a solicitor, but the “Mr Biswas” by which we know him, right from the cradle. Mr Biswas faces many humiliations, but is rarely shorn of the modicum of dignity the honorific guarantees. The retention of this proper form of address is both comic and tense, particularly in the early sections of the