A dwelling of one's own functions as the material proof of an independent self; without it a person remains psychologically absorbed into whoever houses them. The struggle to acquire property is less about shelter than about having a visible boundary that says where one person ends and another's claim begins.
A large kin network can offer food, lodging and belonging while extracting obedience and dissolving individual standing in return. The provision is real but conditional, so the dependent member gains security at the cost of being perpetually minor in the household's hierarchy.
Mr Biswas, after a lifetime of living in others' houses, buys a jerry-built house from a swindling solicitor's clerk: badly constructed, overpriced, mortgaged beyond his means, with a staircase that is dangerous and rooms that leak. He dies soon after in that house, still in debt, yet it remains his: imperfect ownership counting as a victory over a life of belonging to no space.
Reading a person's entire biography against a single unmet want (here, a house) reveals how a seemingly small goal can organize decades of frustration, drift and small defiances. The lens treats a life not by its public achievements but by the private standard the person set for themselves and whether they reached it.