The Strange Case Of Billy Biswas Analysis

Crisis of self and a quest for fulfilment is the central experience of Arun Joshi’s second novel ‘The Strange Case of Mr.Billy Biswas’. In this novel he explores the theme of alienation and rootlessness in a strange way. Arun Joshi offers a dramatic presentation of a complex character of Billy who finds himself rootless and alienated from his surroundings in the first part of the novel. There is every possibility of his breaking down. In the latter part, he takes refuge in the world of tribal where he finds his identity and his roots. There he feels ‘established’. When certain external forces try to uproot him from there, he prefers dying, to succumbing to their black and deep desires. The so-called civilized world destroys him by all means; the tribal world guarded him as his own. Thus the novel stands as a bitter commentary on the tyranny of the forces of phoney civilizations that crushes man’s desire for self-existence and kinship with nature.

Key Words: Existentialist, Rootless , Primitivism, Tribal

It is apt to quote K.R.S.Iyengar here, ‘In The Strange case of Billy Biswas’(1971),Arun Joshi has carried his exploration of the consciousness of hapless rootless people a stage further and has revealed to our gaze new gas-chambers of self –forged