Reconstruction Of Home A Postcolonial Reading Of V. S. Naipaul’s A House For Mr. Biswas

V. S. Naipaul holds an unique place in English Literature because of his multicultural background and his great achievements. His unique point of view as an exiled writer characterizes his special creative theme. As one of his masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas provides us with good materials to understand Naipaul. This thesis attempts to interpret the theme of home from the post-colonial perspective, arguing that the protagonist’s search for his own house is derived from the desire for a home. Home is a place providing physical and spiritual safety and consolation. Therefore, it is everyone’s desire. Those colonials who were far away from their homeland always tried to go back to the homeland or reconstruct a new home in the new land. Through telling an ordinary person’s striving for his own house, Naipaul presented the colonials’ living condition and their yearning for home; at the same time he expressed his opinion about the reconstruction of home in colony. By carefully analyzing the text, we can find three indispensable elements in constructing a home for Naipaul, including autonomy, love, and order.This thesis consists of an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. The introduction focuses on the significance of this research, previous studies related to this research at home and aboard, a revision of the definition of home, and an attempt to propose a new definition of home that best suits the novel.The first chapter focuses on the reconstruction of autonomy. The reason why colonials represented by Mr. Biswas needed to construct their autonomy was that they were in the crisis of autonomy. Therefore, the first section of this chapter is to present the colonial’s crisis of autonomy. The second section is to explore how the colonials constructed their autonomy. The last section is extended to the development of the autonomy through exploring Mr. Biswas’s efforts in cultivating the awareness of autonomy in the next generation.The second chapter discusses the reconstruction of love between family members. In the world Naipaul constructed, the relationship between family members was cold and alienated:mothers did not care about their children, and wives were not loyal to their husbands. This chapter mainly expanded this topic from the reconstruction of love between husband and wife and the reconstruction of love between mother and son.The third chapter explores the reconstruction of order. The colonials lived a dark and chaotic life, and to crave for a happy life, the reconstruction of order was quite necessary. Their reconstruction of order is analyzed from two perspectives:one being the reconstruction of inner order among family members, and the other the reconstruction of a harmonious relationship between mankind and nature. The order of the family the novel showed was the male-centered because of Naipaul’s limitation. But his emphasis on the reconstruction of harmonious relationship between mankind and nature threw light on his advancement.The conclusion summarizes the main content of this thesis by reclaiming the main achievements of this research, reassessing the protagonist’s search for his own house, and confirming Naipaul’s key theme that the process of the reconstruction of house is actually the search for a home. But this kind of reconstruction of home was doomed to fail because of the control and influence from metropolitan states.