Student Question
How does Naipaul use comic sensibility in A House for Mr. Biswas?
Quick answer:
V. S. Naipaul’s use of comic sensibility in A House for Mr. Biswas is an aspect of the author's writing style that interweaves absurd events and preposterous situations into a plot line that also depicts poverty and a struggle for identity.
Through the use of comedy in his writing, Naipaul satirizes human gullibility and underscores the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. He also pokes fun at religious hypocrisy. Some examples of comic sensibility in the novel include the pronouncements of the pundit (an esteemed religious and scholarly wise man of the village) on the future of a newborn Mr. Biswas, who comes into the world already marked with the “bad omens” of a “wrong way” (breech) birth and a six-fingered hand.
The village pundit foretells that the child will have an “unlucky sneeze.” He also claims that in order to “mitigate” the bad luck that Mr. Biswas carries with him, his father must not see the newborn for twenty-one days, after which his first view of the child must be as a reflection in a brass plate filled with coconut oil that the infant’s mother must make from coconuts she has harvested...
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“with her own hands.” The reader gets the sense that the pundit has made this up on the spot and that there is no traditional precedent for such a ritual.
Another instance of comic sensibility in the novel takes place when young Mr. Biswas is sent off by his Aunt Tara to become the apprentice of another pundit. The child eats a couple of bananas from a bunch that were gifted to the pundit, and he is punished by being forced to eat the remaining seven—all at one time. The result is that he becomes constipated and his bowel movements no longer follow a morning schedule.
This leaves the child in the awful predicament of being stuck indoors in a locked house at night and unable to use the outhouse when he needs it. In desperation, he resorts to relieving himself upon a cotton napkin and jettisoning the package out the window and “into the woods.” Unfortunately, his aim is bad and it lands in the pundit’s favorite oleander tree. This event incites the wrath of the pundit and causes young Mr. Biswas to lose the apprenticeship.