A Father-Son Relationship: Mr. Biswas’s Search for Identity in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas

Abstract

V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas describes an Trinidadian-Indian man’s lifelong struggle to secure and find a home for his family. From birth, he is declared to have a spell-bound fate. The sudden and unexpected death of his father leaves the remaining members houseless and unattended, and Mr. Biswas has suffered from hardships in various places. Without proper father to protect and guide him, Mr. Biswas has to determine his life course with many difficulties. The father figures he has encountered can be said to represent traditional Indian life style, or Hindu tradition, but all of them prove to be oppressive and sometimes exploitative. It is these unworthy aspects of father figures that cause Mr. Biswas to escape from fathers and Hinduism and find his own home. His struggle for freedom has much to do with establishing his own identity out of one of the collective Tulsi sons-in-law. The Tulsi house is ambiguous like his dead father in that it provides shelter for the in-laws, yet it frequently comes to dominate those in-laws under matriarchal family structure. Economic ability is one of essential factors that determines one’s status in the Tulsidom, and this fact suggests the changing atmosphere of the world the Tulsis belong to. Mr. Biswas’s successful career as a journalist is possible thanks to his English writing, and for the first time in life Mr. Biswas is able to enjoy a secure family life. The English language, representing the British colonial power, gradually replaces Hindi language and Indian tradition, to introduce to the Tulsis a new modern world in which each individual has to compete against one another for better future. With his career secure and family comfortably settled down, Mr. Biswas is now able to look to Hindu tradition from which he has endeavored to escape. His notion of Hindu tradition is different from father figures’ in that he has done all he could do to support his family and children with parental affection and care. His seeming reconciliation with Hindu tradition is, however, illusory, since he fails to reconcile with his own son. Anand’s decision to stay away from his father implies the end of one era to which Mr. Biswas and his contemporaries belong. That Mr. Biswas is unable to make peace with his own son and fall back into the tradition implies the impossibility of complete escape from the past. The modern society may offer certain advantages, but it does not seem to provide him with sure means of belonging, which is essential for his identity as Mohun Biswas.