Summary
Chapter 1: "'Amazing Scenes'"
Leaving Hanuman House, Mr. Biswas, on a whim, gets onto a bus bound for Port of Spain. There, he goes to see his sister Dehuti with her husband Ramchand and decides to stay with them for a time. Walking into the offices of the Trinidad Sentinel, the newspaper where his friend Misir works, Mr. Biswas manages to get an interview with the editor, who agrees to give him a try at reporter work.
Stitching together sensationalistic stories from information he picks up walking around the city's police offices, prisons, and the like, Mr. Biswas establishes himself enough to earn a salaried position as the paper's shipping reporter; he also plays the role of the "Scarlet Pimpernel," where readers of the paper who approach and accost him with a certain phrase can win a prize. He goes back to Arcawas to Hanuman House, where he reconciles with Shama and takes up Mrs. Tulsi's offer of a house in Port of Spain. He lives there for some time with his family and Owad, Mrs. Tulsi's son, until the whole Tulsi family pours into the house to see off Owad, whom Mrs. Tulsi sends to Cambridge to study medicine.
Chapter 2: The New Regime
After Owad leaves, Mrs. Tulsi takes the whole large family back to Arcawas to Hanuman House, leaving the house in Port of Spain (where Mr. Biswas remains with his family) somewhat emptied. Visiting Hanuman House, Mr. Biswas and Shama are perturbed by several disputes within the family between Mrs. Tusli and Seth about Shekhar and his westernized wife, Dorothy. Back in Port of Spain at the Trinidad Sentinel, Mr. Burnett is sacked and Mr. Biswas must deal with a change in his reporting assignment and a general shift towards stultifying seriousness at the paper. As he spends more time reading, so does Anand. The family begins going to see Tara and Ajodha on the weekends. When Seth parks his lorries in the shed by the side of the Port of Spain house, Mr. Biswas is unpleasantly reminded of the fact that, not he, but rather the Tulsi family, owns the house.
Chapter 3: The Shorthills Adventure
The Tulsis abruptly decide to move from their house in Arcawas to take up residence in Shorthills, near Port of Spain. Leaving behind Seth, with whom she and many of her daughters are quarreling, Mrs. Tulsi, along with Mr. Biswas and his family, moves into the house and begins to work some of the expansive fields nearby, raise livestock, and sell some of the nearby lumber. Domestically, Mr. Biswas comes into conflict with the brother-in-law living in the room directly across from his family's, whom he satirically names "W. C. Tuttle" after an author he reads.
Many incidents punctuate Mr. Biswas' stay at the Shorthills house. Seven of Mrs. Tulsi's daughters are married off; Mr. Biswas orders a bookcase made by a local blacksmith; Americans come to the village; "W. C. Tuttle" and Govind become infamous for selling trees and fruit from the property for their own profit; the children go to school, but because of the distance and lack of regular transportation, they end up spending most of the day out of home. In quick succession, one of the brothers-in-law named Sharma, the pundit Hari, and Mrs. Tulsi's sister, Padma, die. After family squabbles and the accusation of a theft within the house, Mr. Biswas determines to have a house built for his own family some distance away; however, one day, he and his children accidentally end up burning down the newly built house (although it is not more than a shack) when they try to make a controlled fire on the land.
Analysis
The transition between Parts 1 and 2 of the novel forms a turning point in Mr. Biswas' personal development and his family's fortunes; where the latter chapters of Part 1 find Mr. Biswas failing repeatedly to establish himself independently from his wife's family, his near accidental trip to Port of Spain and the newspaper job he finds finally allow him to accumulate the means necessary not only for purchasing a house of his own but also for gathering the self-regard to feel like his own man.
A crucial moment of realization in Mr. Biswas' first days at Port of Spain marks a turn from his dreamy idealism, into which he has fallen quite abruptly after the trauma of the destruction of the Green Vale house, towards a cynical yet honest consciousness of the difficulties he has to face in order to achieve true independence and freedom: "His freedom was over, and it had been false. The past could not be ignored; it was never counterfeit; he carried it within himself. If there was a place for him, it was one that had already been hollowed out by time, by everything he had lived through, however imperfect, makeshift and cheating" (285). The consciousness that Mr. Biswas gains at this juncture may be expressed not only as a determination oriented towards future resolution of his life's contradictions, but also as a valuation of his past as such, precisely for the reason that it was made up of such unremarkable penury and bad luck. One might even go so far as to identify this critical attention to the past with an understanding of the story as Naipaul's attempt to grapple with his own autobiography.
The fact that Mr. Biswas, formerly mainly a sign-painter, ends up as a journalist and writer provides some support to the connection between Naipaul's own status as a writer and the intentions he attributes to his protagonist. Mr. Biswas himself starts out at writing, one could say, in the converse way of Naipaul—by layering texts onto his own life, which makes for both great comedic effect and narrative sophistication.
If one pays close attention, it becomes apparent that, from the time that Mr. Biswas gains writerly ambitions, the narrative itself, which has been following him over his shoulder, adapts his characteristic wry humor, as in the following sequence:
"Trash," Mr Biswas said.
"Trash," Anand told Prakash.
"You call my books trash?" Prakash's father asked Mr Biswas some mornings later, when they opened their doors at the same time.
"I didn’t call your books trash" (362).
By concatenating the three timeframes of dialogue so that they seem to be happening all at once and eliding the contexts and mental intentions of the characters, Naipaul distills the comedic chain of cause-and-effect and achieves a kind of cinematic immediacy, which stands out among the countless little domestic scenes of the narrative.
