But bigger than them all was the house, his house.
How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.
"—
V.S. Naipul. A House for Mr. Biswas.
The prologue’s closing paragraph, written in the past tense infinitive records the travails overcome to arrive at the imperfect present. Beginning with the present, “at this time,” and writing backwards to the moment of “unnecessary” birth, the paragraph’s configuration performs the Bildungsroman’s tautologous system. Standing at the narrative’s close, we begin at the ending ready to read how we arrived here.
