What is the significance of the title A House for Mr. Biswas?
For much of Mr. Biswas's life, his biggest ambition is to have his own house, but his ambition is thwarted time and time again. The bad luck that seems to follow him through his life began with him being born with two extra fingers at a time of night which was considered to be unlucky.
He enters an arranged marriage young, and winds up living in a mud hut for a while. Later, while Mr. Biswas is living in a dirty barracks, he decides he wants to build his own house. However, he is hasty in his approach to the task, and the unfinished structure is later burnt down, thereby putting an end to his dream.
Later in life, while living in a family home owned by his wife, Mr. Biswas saves some money and builds a house again. Disaster strikes once more when his house is destroyed by fire...
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less than a month after it is completed. After that, he seems to give up on his long-held dream of home ownership for a time.
Later, he makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy a home rather than build one himself. Despite the fact that he pays too much money for a house that has not been well-built, he finally achieves his dream of having a house of his own. After everything that he has endured, he had a place of his own for the last five years of his life.
What is the significance of Hanuman House in A House for Mr. Biswas?
In A House for Mr. Biswas, the protagonist's great ambition is to have a house of his own. This represents independence and security for him. The Hanuman House symbolizes the exact opposite. The house is run by Mr. Biswas's mother-in-law, Mrs. Tulsi, the matriarch of a large and wealthy Trinidadian Hindu family. The Tulsi family use the house as a way of controlling their younger generation and keeping their daughters at home even after they are married.
They marry their daughters to high-caste, unemployed men who have little hope of getting a job, often through lack of education. These men are then given a job in the Tulsi family business but are not paid a salary. Instead, they are given food and lodging in the Hanuman House, a big white crumbling fortress of a building with the family store on the ground floor presided over by a statue of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman (ironically, the Lord of Celibacy) on the roof.
The Hanuman House represents authoritarianism and servitude. Mrs. Tulsi runs it tyrannically, and none of the married couples there have any freedom. Mr. Biswas is unhappy in the house, and the conflicts of his early married life are often caused or exacerbated by its oppressive atmosphere and his desire to move out.