Naomi Ngaomei

The Tragicomic Struggle for Selfhood, Language, and Alienation in Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas

Abstract V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961) endures as a seminal postcolonial novel because it transforms the seemingly ordinary misadventures of Mohun Biswas into a tragicomic allegory of colonial existence. The protagonist’s lifelong pursuit of a house, at once mundane and monumental, becomes a stage where...