Analysis Of The Namesake By Jhumpa Lahiri

Difficult choices come and go from our life. Like trying to understand who you are as a person and where you come from. In the book The Namesake, a boy named Gogol grows up in a cultural Bengali family while living in a different country with different customs. Gogol is special because he is trying to balance the two cultures. Gogol tries to understand and learn his family's culture but tends to pick and choose things from each culture to fit his lifestyle. His response to his cultural collision is very unique. From this cultural collision Gogol question himself and his life decisions.

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

to America with grace and compassion. This story by Jhumpa Lahiri, is an allegory establishing an identity with using symbolic meaning between two cultures that intersect. The themes throughout the story refer to immigrant experiences, the conflict of cultures, the contrast of assimilation and the connection between generations. The Namesake, opens the worlds of emotions Ashima experiences, while straddling her two worlds. This story of identity allows readers to travel with Ashima on an intimate journey through her life as an immigrant.

Most people use the phrase,“ home is where the heart is” to describe a home, but without a heart in it you're lost in a world looking for it. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, Gogol is a guy who’s divided between two worlds: his American life and fitting in like a regular everyday American guy, and his family's traditional heritage lifestyle. Along with ...While Gogol refers to home in more than one location along with his relationship with women are relevant to help him search what he is lacking in his life and finding the right place for him is where he wishes not to remember of Pemberton road.

The film The Namesake started out while Ashoke Ganguli was traveling on a train to visit his grandfather. On the train Ashoke meets fellow traveler, Ghosh, who impresses upon him to start traveling. The train crashes and Ashoke almost dies but is found and survives. After the crash, Ashoke relocates to America for school. In 1977, Ashoke returns home to India to be arranged to marry Ashima. When Ashima accepts Ashoke’s marriage proposal, she has to move to New York with him where their residence becomes permanent. Ashima has to adapt and adjust to American culture, which is very hard for her because she has never been out of India and she misses her family. Shortly after, they become parents of a boy, who they name Nikhil, with the

Jhumpa Lahiri in The Namesake illustrates the assimilation of Gogol as a second generation American immigrant, where Gogol faces the assimilation of becoming an American. Throughout the novel, Gogol has been struggling with his name. From kindergarten to college, Gogol has questioned the reason why he was called Nikhil when he was a child, to the reason why he was called Gogol when he was in college. Having a Russian name, Gogol often encounters questions from people around him, asking the reason of his name. Gogol was not given an Indian name from his Indian family or an American name from the fact that he was born in America, to emphasize that how hard an individual try to assimilate into a different

Many second generation minorities from immigrant parents are driven subconsciously to conform to new culture and social norms. For foreign born parents and native born children integrating the two cultures they inhabit brings about different obstacles and experiences. In Jhumpa’s “The Namesake” the protagonist Gogol is a native born American with foreign born parents. The difference with birth location plays an important role in assimilating to a new society in a new geography. The difficulty for parents is the fact that they’ve spent a decent amount of time accustomed to a new geography, language, culture and society which makes it difficult to feel comfortable when all of that changes. For Gogol the difficulty only lies with the cultural norms imposed by his parent’s and the culture and social norms that are constantly presented in the new society.

Forming a new identity in a foreign country is not an easy task. Immigrants usually face challenges to identify themselves. Identity formation is the development of one’s distinctive personality due to particular reasons such as new environment, new culture and conflicts. During the process, some characters from Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake either create or deny the bond with their own culture; some undergo conflicts among generations. Those processes reflect significantly in Ashima and Gogol throughout the book. The degree of assimilations determines to what extent the characters have formed the new identity in the new culture.

In Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake, the disparate cultures of India and America affirms to the binary paradigm of “the one” and “the other”, manifesting the dominance of one from the other and its impact to influence and cause cultural and identity issues. The collision of the two cultures forms a process of trying to construct an identity and a destruction of an ethnic identity, with different factors to consider such as space and other sociocultural codes. This film about the Indian American also shows the concept of model-minority image, standards and expectations imposed to Asian Americans. The Namesake embodies the cultural and identity issues of an Asian American, particularly the Indian Americans, exemplifying the experiences of the

The Namesake, written by Jhumpa Lahira, a famous Indian writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection Interpreter of Maladies, brilliantly illustrates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. In this novel, the main characters Ashima and her husband, Ashoke, were first generation immigrants in the United States from India. The whole story begins with Ashima's pregnancy and her nostalgia of her hometown, and a sense of melancholy revealed from the first chapter. While Ashima felt insecure and worried about her new life in the United States, her husband Ashoke, rather wanted to settle in and struggle for a new life. All of uncertainty and reluctance of this new-coming couple faded way when their son,

The Namesake, a winner of the Pulitzer prize, is a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri published in the year 2003. In the year 2007, The Namesake became a significant motion picture. The novel and film, both convey the theme of culture clash between American and Indian tradition. As the story transitions, the theme is exhibit by the struggles the Ganguli family went through in America such as Gogol’s name, influence Indian traditions into the Gangulis lives of the children, and the failures in the love affairs Gogol faced. The novel and film The Namesake both do one excellent job portraying the growth in culture of two traditions expanding within society in the American and Indian traditions.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s”, Eliot’s babysitter, Mrs. Sen, has a daily ritual of chopping vegetables with her blade from India. However, during the chopping process, Eliot is not allowed to move around the room unless it is absolutely necessary. Mrs. Sen is an immigrant and does not like living in America. She misses India, leading to her reminiscing about her past. This reminiscing prevents Mrs. Sen from integrating into her new surroundings. When people focus on their cultural past, they can be prevented from assimilating into their new surroundings.

The Namesake film gives a strong view on inter-subjectivity which is the shared public symbolic systems of a culture. For example, when Ashima asks her husband, Ashoke , "do you want me to say I love you like Americans", and he replies "yes". Also, when Maxine, who is Nikhil's girlfriend, notices a kurta dress, which is indian dress, and says "I grew up with fabrics". The Namesake covers culture clashes which leads to consequences on a group of people. Also, the clip derives a sense of visual imperialism which is photographs that provide visual evidence to commit myths about race and culture. For example, Nikhil is taking pictures of his sister, when she is wearing the Indian official dress, although his sister was born and raised in

Imagine two trains, each from opposite ends of the country, stopping at the same station right in the middle of the country, and the passengers of the trains being exchanged, as they are vacationing. No vivid imagination is needed here, as this is a real-life situation. People come and go, and one may even have taken part in such an experience, without giving much thought to it. It seems to be such a simple idea, and broadening it seems too difficult to even try, much less make it successful. After all, what use would this concept even be to people? Why would people care about trains? Of course, literal perception always finds its way to cloud judgement of any thoughts, from the simplest thoughts of a train to complex ideas even scientists have trouble understanding, such as spirituality. However, accomplishing all of this arrives an author, Jhumpa Lahiri, from one of the trains mentioned, vacationing, exploring her ride, delivering a beautiful novel, The Namesake, as a guide to a new perception of the world, like putting in contacts. Placing literal different settings for readers’ quick comprehension and creating a drama for symbolic purposes while delivering a message, the theme, she intended to present to her audiences, Lahiri outdoes herself. Using these elements of setting, symbolism, and theme to her advantage, Lahiri molds beautiful effects on her characters, ultimately affecting the readers of her novel, The Namesake.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) is a culture-oriented, more precisely, a Bengali diasporic culture-oriented novel. As a diasporic novel it represents the diasporic themes like displaced, dislocated and deterritorised feelings of the first generation expatriates like Ashima Ganguli, the female protagonist of the novel; assimilated, translational and transcultural tendency among the diasporic people, especially among the second generation immigrants in the novel like Gogol Ganguli, Sonali Ganguli and Moushumi Mazoomdar; a feeling of nostalgia towards the natal/imaginary homeland by the first generation expatriates like Ashima Ganguli; the community feeling among the diasporic people; the familial, human relationships within a diasporic family in a diasporic land and other traits. Ashima Ganguli is moored in diasporic land with her feelings of rootlessness/uprooting/re-rooting/tracking root and also finds routes to discover her at home in many homes in the world. The Bengali diasporic cultures are amalgamated dexterously in the texture of the novel. Lahiri’s The Namesake was adapted as a film in 2006, released on March 9, 2007, following screenings at film festivals in Toronto and New York City. The film is directed by an Indian born filmmaker Mira Nair, living in the US. Sooni Taraporevala adapted the novel into a screenplay. The film received positive reviews/acclaims from American critics and won ‘Love is Folly International Film Festival’ (Bulgaria)-"Golden