“He Was Oppressed by a Sense of Loss”: Stylistic Constructions of the Tragic in A House for Mr Biswas

This chapter analyses various stylistic features which contribute to the discursive construction of the tragic in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. While not arguing for the explicit placement of the novel within the genre of “tragedy” itself, this paper contends that a recurrent focus on physical suffering/illness and a teleological preoccupation with ruin and loss nonetheless speak to a sense of “ontological homelessness” that is a hallmark of the tragic (Steiner, New Literary Hist 35(1):2, 2004). Key to the analysis is a focus on psychological perspective—who observes the events that take place and the types of discourse that are used by that narrative voice (Fowler, Linguistic criticism. Oxford University Press, p. 134, 1996)—and on agency as mediated through transitivity. Analyses of transitivity, when coupled with those of psychological perspective, provide insight into ideological and conceptual positions towards narratological models of reality, highlighting the various constructions of the tragic in A House for Mr Biswas. The analysis shows Biswas to often be powerless, frequently the subject of his family’s and society’s desires. Various techniques used by the narrative voice are suggested to be “distancing,” working to compound a sense of aloneness through representations of psychological perspective such as Free Indirect Thought. The teleological aspect of the novel also characterises the narrator as withdrawn from the narrative, both through discursive choices (referring to Biswas as “Mr” as a baby and a child) and through narrative ones (psychological perspective which evaluates Biswas’ life at a remove). On a larger, metadiscursive level, the chapter argues that the stylistic features inherent to the narrative’s representation of suffering and the narrator’s withdrawal are intimately linked to the novel’s interrogation of the colonial enterprise.