THE PUPIL OF LITERATURE

  A HOUSE FOR MR.BISWAS deals with a theme of deeper significance, the theme of selfhood where an individual quests for identity and struggles to acquire a personal place for which the “house” stands as an evocative symbol all through. It traces the story of a man’s struggle to make something out of a circumscribed and mediocre existence. The concluding lines of the ‘Prologue’ to the novel sum up, in a nutshell, what the novel is actually about: “How terrible it would have been at this time, to be without it…to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.” The words very clearly suggests that the ‘House’ becomes a symbol of order and identity. It affirms the importance of such values as independence, individuality, creativity and a degree of freedom from human complicity.     The possibility of acquiring a personal space in the New World is suggestive of a fragile hope.   The protagonist, Mr. Biswas’s task in the novel happens to be to create something