Addiction in Jhumpa Lahiri´s Unaccustomed Earth: Only Goodness

Johnson provides a brief account of the novella 's plot, together with his own perspective on the fact that so much of literature and literary analysis concentrates on the relationships that the characters have. In this case, the author examines the family as composed of children of ineffectual parents. While this writer does not know this with certainty, it is possible that many cases requiring family therapy are due to this very cause. The author then goes on to discuss the family in the context of the greater social system.

Once an individual realizes that life is giving him a second chance, he transforms into a new breed of a man; there is an innovation of ideas that arise in him as he realizes that there is no correlation between being safe and staying alive. Ashoke Ganguli becomes a new man after miraculously surviving a train accident on his way to visit his recently blinded grandfather, who was awaiting for his grandchild to give him more books, his getaways from the real world. Moreover, the train accident became the defining moment of Ashoke Ganguli as his love for fiction books became nothing more than a former hobby. The train accident stirred the callow man’s dormant dreams, as he realized that his life is not secured. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is comprised of eight short stories about different Indian families’ struggles in America, many of them going through the immigrant experience. The conflicts are with friends and family, and also with themselves, as each of them attempt to find their own identity along with fitting in with the rest of society. One of the causes of these struggles that because the families in the stories are mixed in terms of generation. Many of the adults in the stories were first generation immigrants from India, while many of the children were raised in the United States, which is the second generation. This led to blending of culture and at the same time, clashes between the immigrant mentality of living and the American mentality of living. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri demonstrates to the reader the important influence of environment, specifically culture and how it impacts parental teachings, on the personality and development of an individuals’ identity, and how the actions and development of characters can affect one’s family and friends; the impact of environment and culture is shown especially by the characters and stories “Hell-Heaven” and “Hema and Kaushik”.

When one reads Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “The Interview”, it is very clear how gender roles are predominate within the family that is portrayed. Using this family as an extension to represent all of India, Jhabvala gives us some insight into the daily lives led over there. The story is told through the eyes of an upper-class man who is completely dependent upon his family, specifically his brother and the women in the house. This essay will examine the male and female roles that are presented in this short story, how they parallel each other, and the deeper meanings hidden within the text.

     The book has many short stories that sometimes are connected with others. The book focuses mainly on showing the degraded Indian society, where everyone is or will be an alcoholic. The story ?The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn?t Flash Red Anymore? (Alexie p. 43-53) is an example of how the author depicts alcoholism in the Indian society. In this story there is a young Indian that could have a nice future playing basketball. However, he turns out to be just like most of the other Indians in his reservation. He was committing crimes and then started drinking.

Addiction is something that occurs when you become dependent on a substance or activity. When people are overwhelmed, things can become too hard to handle which can lead to addiction. The addiction then takes over their body and they can not control it, they are always craving what they are addicted to and using it to cope which makes them stop thinking straight. People are worried about things that are not in their control such as their environment, culture, friends and family which can make people develop an addiction. In the novel Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, Elijah and Xavier turned to morphine when things got hard in the war. Both Elijah and Xavier were stressed with the pressures of the war. Many factors influenced Elijah and

Soma in the World State is equivalent to drugs in modern day society. Heroin and Opioid is one of the closest drugs that is related to soma, in with being used as a stress reliever and having the same side effects. In Rajita Sinha manuscript “Chronic Stress, Drug Use, and Vulnerability to Addiction” claimed that “[m]any of the major theories of addiction also identify an important role of stress in addiction processes. These range from psychological models of addiction that view drug use and abuse as a coping strategy to deal with stress, to reduce tension, to self medicate, and to decrease withdrawal-related distress” (Sinha). Sinha claims that people will use drugs in order to relieve stress, in the book Brave New World that's exactly what the people use soma for to relieve their stress in life, like what Benard did after everyone had left him or when Lenina went to the reservation had regretted for leaving her soma back at their room.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” examines an immigrant bengali family that has moved from India to America, and tries to hold their bengali culture while trying to accept American lifestyles. Ashima and Gogol each struggle with their cultural identity throughout Lahiri’s novel. The pressure of western society and the crisis of losing one’s culture and identity is demonstrated through the characterization and Gogol and Ashima’s relationships while living in America.

An analogy has been drawn about how she was in the past and how is she now. She was a carefree person, demanding love in her life, wanting to take care of her children and become a house wife and now she works as a schoolteacher, has become a responsible person concerned about her husband and child, struggling for her son’s life, bearing tantrums of her sister-in-law and living in a small house in a small city. On the other hand, Komal, sister-in-law of Anjali is a character shown who seems to be frustrated from her life from the time she has lost her husband. The book has depicted another face of an Indian woman, who lives her entire life following the customs that the society has decided for a widow. Anjali tried to make her first marriage successful by taking care of small things like making her husband, his favorite cardamom chai and best of meals while Prakash’s second wife Indu was never concerned about any of his likings and gave priority to her own personal

The short story "Hell-Heaven" written by Jhumpa Lahiri, is about the clashing of the cultures of a Bengali family settling in the west. While story is told in the child's point of view as she matures to a young woman, we're also given the experiences of the people around her through her eyes. These people include her mother, father and a family friend. They each have a different experience as an immigrant migrating and living in America, which leaves us to wonder what message is the author trying to convey with this piece of literature. However, the message to come from "Hell-Heaven" Jhumpa Lahiri is that immigrant families face struggles and tribulations living in unfamiliar territory and having to choose one culture over another.

When adapting to a new culture, many find it hard to assimilate into their new world while still holding on to their past life. Finding yourself in a new place with a new language and unfamiliar faces is challenging for immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri, an immigrant herself, sheds some light on the Indian culture in her book, Interpreter of Maladies. She conveys many challenges that immigrants face when moving away from their homeland in a myriad of short stories. These short stories introduce similar themes of immigration and adaptation through different experiences. Two of Lahiri’s short stories, “A Temporary Matter” and “Mrs. Sens”, do a great job in showing similar challenges of cultural differences in two different ways. They introduce characters

The disease model of addiction and the moral model of addiction provide completely different explanation for the tendency of substance abuse. The disease model of addiction predates to 1784 when the American physician Benjamin Rush published a pamphlet which discussed alcoholism in medical terms and outlined treatments for what he considered was a “disease” (Atkins, 2014, p. 52). This model of addiction generally argues that it is not the individuals fault for their addiction to drugs and that not all, but some people, will inevitably become addicts in the future (p. 52). Inversely, the moral model of addiction does not view addiction as something that an individual “cannot control,” rather this model looks at addiction as something that an individual can certainly control but that the individual does not chose to because of “weak moral character” (p.52). Although both of these models have been, and still are, widely applied to other substances, the most common substance that it was used was for alcohol.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ Mr. Kapasi , the main character, seems to be a person with mixed feelings. He does not seem to have fixed stand neither in his job nor on his thoughts. His thoughts and experience are structured by the strict cultural society of India. His hidden wants and desires suppressed by the community rules are looking for way to come out. The consequence is his changing thoughts and desires which at different parts of the story appear differently and brings

“Addiction is a brain disease expressed in the form of compulsive behavior,” says by Alan Leshner in his article, “Addiction Is a Brain Disease” featured in the book Drug Abuse: Opposing Viewpoints. Addiction has a variety of meanings depending on what your viewpoint of addiction. According to dictionary.com, the concrete definition of the word addiction is, “the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.” Basically various doctors and therapist consider addiction to be a genetic disorder. “Provocative, controversial, unquestionably incomplete, the dopamine hypothesis provides a basic framework

The present study is based on the idea of displacement as the major theme of the selected short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of maladies”. The book contains nine short stories and each one of them deals with the question of identity, alienation, and plight of those who are physically and psychologically displaced. But I would like to limit my studies to the three short stories from the collection viz. “When Mr. Pirzada came to dine”, Interpreter of Maladies”, and “Mrs. Sen’s”. The migration has become one of the most important issues of the contemporary world. Jhumpa Lahiri is also a diasporic writer like Salman Rushdie, V.S Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee. The characters in the prescribed stories are citizens of more than one country