Summary
Chapter 4: The Chase
After leaving Hanuman House with Shama, Mr. Biswas settles into a ramshackle house in a town called The Chase, where he will end up staying for six years, making his living running a small grocery shop he calls "The Bonne Esperance Grocery." Away from the large Tulsi family, Mr. Biswas begins to experience married life with Shama; she has, meanwhile, changed almost instantaneously from a girl to a woman and mother. Mr. Biswas also becomes much better acquainted with the various quirks and disputes among the many parents and children of Hanuman House, whom they still see relatively often; the mothers beat the children severely, but also with great pride.
Shama goes back to her family for a time to have her and Mr. Biswas' first child delivered; when Mr. Biswas goes to see his firstborn, he finds that Mrs. Tulsi has already named the girl Savi. Meanwhile, Mr. Biswas also becomes interested in short stories from his journalist from Misir, from whom he has to borrow money to pay off a man with whom he unwisely gets into a legal dispute. He also begins to read more Hindu philosophy and Marcus Aurelius. Shama has two more children: a son named Anand and a daughter named Myna.
Chapter 5: Green Vale
Mr. Biswas leaves The Chase and gets a job from Seth to work as a driver (i.e. an overseer of sugarcane workers) in Green Vale, where he also engages George Maclean, a carpenter, to build him the house he has always wanted. He borrows money from Ajodha to pay Maclean, his laborer, and to buy the building materials; during this time, he also pays his own family a visit and sees his nephews. As the construction of the house, which Mr. Biswas has planned meticulously, proceeds, Mr. Biswas leaves the rundown barracks house, in which he has been living as a driver, to live in the almost-completed house.
Since Shama goes back to Hanuman House very often—she still considers it her home and wherever she lives with Mr. Biswas as a kind of temporary residence—Mr. Biswas finds himself alone with a great deal of time to think about his life. He realizes both (1) that he feels that much of his past life has been wasted time and (2) that he feels a kind of innate fear and distrust of other people. At this time, he begins to raise a puppy he calls Tarzan to help guard him against the sugarcane laborers he oversees, who act hostilely towards him. At a peak of his paranoia, he drives Shama out of his house but manages to keep Anand. One day, they discover that the villagers have killed Tarzan—and then a violent storm partially destroys the house.
Chapter 6: A Departure
After the storm, Mr. Biswas and Anand are brought to Hanuman House. Mr. Biswas—though not exactly insane, as the Tulsi family had heard—has been deeply traumatized by the experience and takes the time to recuperate within the security of his in-laws' home. He learns from Seth that the laborers burned down what remained of his house after the storm. Deciding that his past has been utterly wasted and filled with unhappiness, Mr. Biswas resolves to seek happiness from the present moment on; he leaves Hanuman House (again) and goes towards Port of Spain.
Analysis
After his almost entirely unintended induction into the sprawling family of the Tulsis and their grand but claustrophobic house, Mr. Biswas finds himself locked in a seemingly hopeless struggle to assert his independence. Realizing early on that, so long as he does not possess a residence of his own and the means to procure such a home, his wife and children will belong more to their family than to him, Mr. Biswas sets about on various attempts to make his own living; that the lack of energy and resolve with which he sets about running his grocery shop in The Chase and working as a driver in Green Vale is only rivaled by the terribleness of his luck is perhaps the best example of the Mr. Biswas' tragicomic fate in the novel.
Naipaul modulates with great naturalness and facility between depictions of Mr. Biswas as risible and despicable, and Mr. Biswas as worthy of great sympathy and hope—an ambivalence that seems quite appropriate considering the autobiographical element of Naipaul's relation to his protagonist. We might observe this duality in the story of Mr. Biswas' dog, Tarzan. In typical fashion, the dog Mr. Biswas intends to use as an intimidating guard dog turns out to be "friendly and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry" (237). However, as the threat of the antagonistic villagers steadily increases—in pace with the intensification of Mr. Biswas' paranoia against them and his family combined—the story reaches a terrifying climax with a nighttime lightning storm that Naipaul describes, deviating from his usual droll humor, with appalling vividness:
Lightning; thunder; the rain on roof and walls; the loose iron sheet; the wind pushing against the house, pausing, and pushing again. Then there was a roar that overrode them all. When it struck the house the window burst open, the lamp went instantly out, the rain lashed in, the lightning lit up the room and the world outside, and when the lightning went out the room was part of the black void. Anand began to scream (263).
No coincidence, then, that this hellish scene is directly preceded by Mr. Biswas and Anand's discovery of Tarzan's dead body. Tarzan becomes, in his presumably being killed by the villagers, a symbol of the cruelty of fate to Mr. Biswas. Tying together yet another pair of narrative ends, Mr. Biswas is taken back to Hanuman House after this episode in order to recover—and it is as though he had never left in the first place.
