Summary
Prologue
The story begins with the time not long before the death of the protagonist, Mohun Biswas. Working as a journalist in Trinidad, Mr. Biswas had four children with his wife Sharma, no money, but, most importantly, a house he had built for himself on Sikkim Street. Although he is very sickly and his family at their wit's end to find a source of money, Mr. Biswas is content that at least he has his own house and does not have to rely on his wife's family, the Tulsis.
Chapter 1: Pastoral
Mr. Biswas was born, the fourth child in his family, in his mother Bipti's village after she went back to her family to complain about her husband Raghu and his miserliness. A pundit comes to tell the boy's fortune and instructs the family to keep the boy (referred to as "Mr. Biswas") away from trees and water, because of the sign of bad luck he was born with: six fingers. Bissoondaye, Bipti's mother, helps take care of the infant Mr. Biswas and deals with Raghu when he shows up to see his newborn son; Bipti and Raghu reconcile. Per the pundit's instructions, Raghu is shown Mr. Biswas in a reflection on a brass plate; the family also learns that the boy has an unlucky sneeze.
While Raghu takes Mr. Biswas' brothers, Pratap and Prasad, to a stream to swim, Mr. Biswas is kept at home because of the pundit's advice and plays with his sister Dehuti. Dhari, the Biswas family's next-door neighbor, pays Raghu to take care of a newborn calf of theirs; Mr. Biswas, who becomes very interested in the calf, takes it wandering around, during which time he discovers a stream and becomes entranced by the fishes in it. One day, however, he loses track of the calf while distracted by the fishes and then, unable to relocate it, decides to go back and hide in his house. Raghu and many villagers go looking for Mr. Biswas and the calf, and they surmise that the two have fallen into the pond. Raghu goes diving for them and brings up the calf; when he goes back again for Mr. Biswas, whom he thinks to be in the water, he drowns.
Bipti's sister Tara, who lives in Pagotes, comes to officiate Raghu's funeral. Afterward, Dhari comes searching in the family's garden for the money that Raghu, a miser, must have been hiding. Eventually, the family moves away and sells Dhari their hut and land to go live with Tara.
Chapter 2: Before the Tulsis
Mr. Biswas learns math and English from Lal, a teacher at the Canadian Mission school in Pagotes, while his family lives with Tara—Dehuti is a maid in Tara's household. At school, Mr. Biswas befriends an eccentric boy named Alec, with whom he does adventurous things. He discovers that he has a talent for letter design. While Pratap and Prasad, grown up, are making their own livings, Mr. Biswas does such things as reading English newspaper columns for Tara's husband, Ajodha, and doing a brief stint training to become a pundit under Pundit Jairam. He returns to Pagotes and works for Bhandat, Ajodha's brother, in Bhandat's rum shop, until he is thrown out from there too. He goes about searching for a job in vain. During this time, he runs into Ramchand, Tara's house-boy with whom Dehuti eloped, and feels estranged by his sister's married life—but then Alec comes back and takes his schoolfriend on as a sign-painter. Mr. Biswas shows much talent and begins to read magazines, novels, and scientific books earnestly. He dreams of love.
Chapter 3: The Tulsis
The large Tulsi family, headed by Mrs. Tulsi (also called Mai), is one of the most important families in the town of Arwacas and owns a conspicuous house on High Street called Hanuman House. Mr. Biswas gets a job painting signs for the Tulsi store, run by Mrs. Tulsi's brother, Seth. While he is there, he catches the eye of one of her daughters, Shama. After a love note that he slipped her is discovered by the family, he is pressured into marrying her; despite misgivings and a short escape to his mother, he eventually settles into Hanuman House. There, he does no work and becomes embroiled in family politics, earning the ire of many family members and a beating from Govind, one of his brothers-in-law, by ridiculing the family and making some shenanigans. He also spends time talking with Misir, an idle journalist, about different movements in Hinduism and politics. Eventually he leaves Hanuman House with a pregnant Shama to try life on their own.
Analysis
Naipaul begins the novel somewhat unusually with the end of the life of his protagonist, Mohun Biswas, surveying Mr. Biswas' attainment of his lifelong dream of building and owning his own house; this beginning is even more unusual in that the seeming culmination of the plot is immediately ironized by a description of how Mr. Biswas (as he is called throughout the novel) still has to deal with lack of money and petty family difficulties, even at an endpoint when those contradictions should be resolved. In this way, Naipaul sets the tone for the rest of the novel and the tragicomic disposition of his protagonist, whom the reader cannot help but view very ambivalently and even laugh at, at times. The more simple and honest Mr. Biswas' hopes and dreams are, the more ridiculously complex become the circumstances and methods of his trying to achieve them become. It is precisely this mixing of the conventionally heroic (as one would expect of the protagonist of a novel) and the comedic that will inform the narrative throughout its development.
The exposition of Mr. Biswas' early life and the poverty of his family present the reader with a wealth of cultural details about the Indian diaspora in Trinidad, in which the author himself grew up; we, presumably as English readers without Naipual's intimate knowledge of Caribbean life, are plunged into a world unfamiliar—not only in terms of its language and conventions, but also in terms of the attitudes of most of its characters. Raghu (Mr. Biswas' father), for example, is presented unflatteringly as a miser and unkind husband, but he is also one of the more forceful characters in the early narrative; Mr. Biswas too, while a quiet and withdrawn child, becomes the center of attention and inadvertently causes most of the dramatic action. Overall, none of the characters seems particularly linked to any larger movement or sense of history; rather, they move about in a somewhat haphazard manner, as is exemplified by the many times that Mr. Biswas must move with his family, from his departure from his house after his father's death to his various attempts at finding something to do in life—attempts that eventually land him, almost by accident, in Hanuman House married into the claustrophobia of the Tulsi family. None of these movements come about by any active striving on the part of the protagonist or anyone near him, who all seem to be moved passively by the succession of events.
This passive attitude of the characters, especially Mr. Biswas, comes to a kind of ironic climax in the scene in which Mr. Biswas is beaten by his brother-in-law. Govind's reason for beating Mr. Biswas in the first place is rather petty—Mr. Biswas spit on his son Owad—and when the narrative begins to describe the violent blows Govind deals Mr. Biswas, it also gives us, in parallel, the latter's unexpectedly detached and bemused observations about the hysteria of the other family members trying to intervene and his own distance from what is going on. Instead of a powerful catharsis of Mr. Biswas' sense of alienation and annoyance with the family, we get a scene that seems almost extraneous (as it does to Mr. Biswas himself, who only starts to feel sore sometime after his beating).
