Summary
Chapter 6: The Revolution
As the time of Owad's return from England approaches, the house in Port of Spain fills with expectant relatives, and Mrs. Tulsi is stirred from her illness and lethargy. Such is the jubilation at his reception at the port that even Seth, who has not spoken to the family in a long time, feels somewhat reconciled. The children and the wives all listen enthusiastically to Owad's tales of his service as a doctor in the Second World War and of the political career that followed, thanks to his distinguished education and the connections he formed with important British figures whom he treated during the war.
The other members of the Tulsi family are especially enthralled to hear about Owad's career in Parliament, where he has become an influential and outspoken figure in the Labor Party, earning the deep respect of some and forming bitter rivalries with other MPs. It seems to all that Owad, a boy from their Trinidadian family, has become a man on the world stage, casually familiar with the names of great figures—and, furthermore, a promulgator of the great hope of communist revolution. Telling tales of colorful strains of cotton and spreading seeds by plane, Owad grasps the imaginations of his relatives with the idea that the revolution is coming, and that it will bring everyone material prosperity.
However, tensions begin to emerge in the family, beginning with a petty altercation Anand has with Owad over opinions on European avant-garde art while they play a weekly Sunday game of bridge, ending with Owad slapping Anand twice. One night, Mr. Biswas, annoyed by the noise in the crowded house, gets into a shouting match with Owad and Mrs. Tulsi that ends with him giving her his notice. Now compelled to move out, Mr. Biswas happens upon a potential house to buy when he runs into a solicitor's clerk in a café who shows him the house he lives in with his mother.
Although he does not feel so enthusiastic about the look and construction of the house in St. James, Mr. Biswas thinks of ways to raise money and negotiate down the price so he can afford the house without going into too much debt. He ends up making a down payment on it. Shama takes the news of this very poorly, seeing the crippling effect that the debt will have on their lives.
The Tulsi family stops entertaining fantasies of "revolution."
Chapter 7: The House
With the negotiations over the house concluded with the solicitor's clerk, Mr. Biswas drives his family over in his Prefect to move to the house. Soon after, they all begin to discover various defective parts of the house: missing curtains, a poorly constructed staircase, the lack of a back door, and so forth. Tacitly agreeing to stop making mention of these problems to each other, they start spending more money to have various things, such as pipes, repaired. Mr. Biswas starts to feel dizzy when he thinks about what he has gotten himself into, but he tries not to think too much—after all, the family has at last succeeded in getting away from the Tulsi family.
Mr. Biswas is scandalized to hear from a local old man that the solicitor's clerk cobbled houses together out of various bits and pieces he would find; however, he is unable to track down the duplicitous man to exact revenge. Nevertheless, he and his whole family set down sentimental roots in the building, and the peace of mind they acquire from this final settling down allows them to go back to the Tulsi house and reconcile peaceably.
Epilogue
Many changes come over the extended Biswas and Tulsi families—and over Trinidad as a whole: Owad ends up marrying a cousin of Dorothy's, whom Dorothy introduced to him, and leaves with her; the presence of American bases increases material well-being to the point that the widows are able to move out from Mrs. Tulsi's house and live in their own houses. Mr. Biswas quits his government job and goes back to the Sentinel, but one day, he collapses with a heart problem; as he recovers at home, he is sacked. Suddenly, he dies, and Shama's many sisters come to the house to pay their respects.
Analysis
After the rising hopes of the previous chapters, the final two chapters bring the novel to its concluding phase of decline, with the up-and-down of Owad's return and Mr. Biswas' departure from the Port of Spain House in "Revolution," as is typical of the ironic Naipaul. Consider this alongside the immense love of home in Mr. Biswas and his family that conquers their final material humiliation of the poorly-made house the solicitor's clerk sells them: the contrast of these two narrative movements provides the novel with an ending that is at once sophisticatedly constructed and highly emotionally effective.
Another important point to observe is the enhanced sense of historical contemporaneity that accompanies Owad's return from England. Earlier in the narrative, we hear vaguely about "the war" and the arrival of Americans, but in Owad's stories about his medical service in World War II and his career in Parliament, the narrative makes a sweep through the British and global political stage that is unlike anything we would have encountered in reading about Mr. Biswas' life. This sudden expansion of scale and swelling of a kind of political enthusiasm—as in the Tulsi family's belief in the prosperity that an (according to Owad) inevitable communist revolution will bring them, and in Anand's admiring imitation of his cosmopolitan uncle—are all quickly put to the lie by just one of the many petty domestic disputes that have taken place all throughout the story.
In this way, the progressive and aspirational impulse is negated, at least in the context of Mr. Biswas' life: there is nothing more for him to do but die. His children, however, are left a brighter future, with both Anand and his sister, Savi, going to study abroad. Most significantly, the family now finally has a house of their own, even if it is a somewhat haphazard building.
In the end, the house on Sikkim Street comes to stand for the ambivalent fate of Mr. Biswas himself. The last few paragraphs of the story make apparent the emotional presence of Mr. Biswas after his death—not through explicitly sentimental remembrances of his person, but rather through an allegorical transposition of his character into the house itself:
Her sisters did not fail Shama. They all came. For them it was an occasion of reunion, no longer so frequent, for they had all moved to their own houses, some in the town, some in the country. Downstairs the doors of the house were open. The door that couldn't open had been made to, and its hinges dislocated. The furniture was pushed to the walls. All that day and evening well-dressed mourners, men, women and children, passed through the house. The polished floor became scratched and dusty; the staircase shivered continually; the top floor resounded with the steady shuffle. And the house did not fall. The cremation, one of the few permitted by the Health Department, was conducted on the banks of a muddy stream and attracted spectators of various races. Afterwards the sisters returned to their respective homes and Shama and the children went back in the Prefect to the empty house. (531)
The fact that Shama's sisters have all gotten their houses too may somewhat dampen the Biswas' pride in having their own house, but the ability of that house, somewhat unexpectedly, to shelter the family Mr. Biswas left behind ends the story of his life in on a mellowly positive note.
