A House for Mr Biswas | Writing Style & Techniques

A House for Mr Biswas Techniques/Literary Precedents

Two radically different novelistic traditions have influenced A House for Mr Biswas: the nineteenth-century English social novel, with its focus on an individual life story amid a large cast of characters, and the existential novels of Camus, particularly The Stranger (1942). Camus, an Algerian in France and a Frenchman in Algeria, poignantly describes the lack of connection between cultural traditions, beliefs, and life. Naipaul, a dispossessed Indian in Trinidad, and a dispossessed colonial in England, experienced a similar difficulty charting a life among traditions that seem alien to him. Just as the existentialists tried to force an answer to the absurdity of life through personal choice and willed behavior, Mohun tries to build a home that challenges his life's absurdity. The house is less important as a structure than as an idea and symbol of emotional commitment. For Naipaul a colonized culture with a diverse immigrant ethnic population is a...
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