On a sentence from 'A House for Mr. Biswas'

While browsing through some old books on Kindle I stumbled upon the novel A House For Mr. Biswas by V S Naipaul. I instinctively started reading it. I had last read this book a few years ago. On the second page, I came across a sentence that made me pause. I re-read the sentence multiple times and found it fascinating. It would be wrong to say that this was the first good sentence in the first two pages but this was the one that made me stop. So, I will try to take a closer look at it. Here’s the sentence - 

And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as before, to retire the moment he got home to the crowded room in one or the other of Mrs Tulsi’s houses, crowded with Shama’s sisters, their husbands, their children.

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It is a long sentence. The longest on the first two pages. It carries a lot of information about Mr. Biswas - his current state of being, the nature of his relationship with his family and in-laws (Shama is his wife and Mrs. Tulsi is his mother-in-law), his obsession with his house, and his semi-reserved nature. The sentence tells all this without sounding like a feature-list of a new gadget in the market. 

Though the sentence is long, there is not a single unnecessary word in it. Let’s try to drop a few words without changing what the sentence conveys.

If the sentence were written in silo, the first word ‘and’ would be unnecessary. But it’s a continuation of the previous sentence which reads - 

“He thought of the house as his own, though for years it had been irretrievably mortgaged.”

So, ‘and’ cannot be dropped. 

Can ‘despair’ be dropped? ‘Illness and despair’, on first look, sounds redundant. Both words convey a similar state of being. This is valid only if you assume that illness is the cause of despair which, in this case, might not be true. The previous sentence says that his house ‘had been irretrievably mortgaged’. This, I think, might also be the cause of his despair and hence it is necessary to use this word in the sentence. 

There is another way in which ‘and despair’ is adding immense value to the sentence. Read out loud ‘illness and despair’ (/ - - - /) and ‘again and again’ (- / - - /). There is a nice symmetry here. Almost poem-like. 

Can ‘as before’ be dropped? It marks the end of the list that elaborates what Mr. Biswas was able to do in his own house. For me, ‘as before’ works as a portal leading to a different contrasting image, a prompt that the scene is going to be changed. Without ‘as before’, the scene of ‘Mrs. Tulsi’s houses’ comes and goes too quickly without warning. 

There are no other words that I think can be considered to be dropped without changing the meaning. 

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In the chapter, this sentence seems to be serving the purpose of introducing us to the idiosyncrasies of Mr. Biswas. It locates Mr. Biswas to a unique corner where few characters go. 

Before this sentence arrives in the book, we have a general sense of Mr. Biswas’s life, the facts so to speak. We know that Mr. Biswas ‘...was forty-six, and had four children. He had no money. His wife Shama had no money’. We also know that he hated his in-laws, and his house ‘had been irretrievably mortgaged’. This sentence deepens our understanding of Mr. Biswas. Let’s see how. 

“And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house”

If the sentence were to stop at ‘wonder of being in his own house’, no one would have complained. It would have been a well-rounded sentence that brings an open thread to a definite closure with a familiar image - a bed-ridden sick person thinking back about significant people and places of his life in wonder. In this case, the object of significance happens to be his own house. But the sentence doesn’t stop here because the word ‘wonder’ can take it only so far. It is expected of someone who’s been financially screwed all his life and ends up owning a house, to be struck by ‘wonder’ because it is a big deal. But to be struck by ‘the audacity’ of being in one’s own house? This is new and this is what takes the sentence to the next level. It tells the degree to which the house is important to him and also in what ways. 

“And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it”

An action is considered audacious if it is out of reach or unthinkable for the person committing it. Now we know something more about Mr. Biswas. Being in his own house was something unthinkable for him. But what does ‘being in one’s own house’ mean? I am sure it would be different for different people. It might as well be an indicator of who one is as a person. The idiosyncrasies of a person are revealed when he is off-guard and there is no place more suited to be off-guard than one’s own house. 

For Mr. Biswas, what are the audacious actions he does in the name of ‘being in his own house’? The sentence addresses this question by giving us a list of actions. This list deepens our understanding of the character. Actions that a normal person would consider basic - walk through the front gate, bar entry to whoever one wishes, close doors and windows every night, roam around freely from room to room and so on - are audacious for Mr. Biswas. Clearly he had been denied these and the last item of the list tells us how. He was not a man who had nowhere to go. He was a man who had a very specific place to go to - Mrs. Tulsi’s house. The phrase ‘instead of being condemned’ tells us that he hated it. The way this sentence ends, it opens the possibility of scenes that elaborate on the interaction of Mrs. Tulsi et al with Mr. Biswas. This is a perfect set up for the drama the novel unfolds. The more we know about Mr. Biswas, the juicier the premise becomes.