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

Abstract

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 identity, displacement, dignity, and belonging are enacted with both heartbreaking seriousness and comic futility. His humiliations, small victories, and persistent failures render the narrative a satire of colonial fragmentation as much as a lament for lost belonging. Scholars have approached the novel through diverse theoretical frameworks, postcolonialism, deconstruction, formalism, cultural history, existentialism, and religious criticism, yet converge on the view that Biswas’s struggle epitomizes the broader condition of postcolonial subjects negotiating invisibility and fragmentation. Critical discussions emphasize themes of language and identity, homelessness, alienation, mimicry, cultural displacement, historical consciousness, and the symbolic resonance of the house. Together, these interpretations underscore Naipaul’s achievement in elevating the ordinary into a tragicomic exploration of colonial history, cultural hybridity, and psychological liberation.