The Book ' The Namesake ' By Jhumpa Lahiri

Our personal identities represent the culmination of our past, the influence of the present that we live in, and what we will be in the future. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, in the short story Double Identity, describes the evolution of her gender and racial identity in her youth and later life. She struggles to balance her female identity within Japanese and American societies, initially within her high school and college years and later during her marriage. Through her experience in school, she seeks harmony between her two identities by conforming to the cultural standards required by the situation at hand. As time passes, she decides that acting according to whichever racial identity she feels suits

Identity crises are common problems for immigrants coming into any country. Deciding whether to stay true to their roots or to assimilate to a new culture puts pressure on many immigrants and their families. Both Jake and Babbitt, from Hester Street and Babbitt respectively, define what means to be American on superficial terms, even though they both believe that being an American does not merely stem from racial identity. They both become obsessed with being as seen as Americans through their social status, physical appearance, the pursuit of wealth, and freedom. While both Jake and Babbitt try to assimilate to American culture, only Babbitt truly succeeds in achieving this goal.

Everyone in the world has their own identity but some are still searching for it. Many base their identity on race, religion, culture and language because it’s easier to belong to a certain group. However, there are some people who struggle with finding where they belong. For instance, James McBride in The Color of Water wonders who he is through most his childhood and some of his adult life. Mcbride tries to find himself by learning about his mother's background. After evaluating his mom’s past,culture and race his own issues with himself were made clearer because now he finally knows where he came from.

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.

In the boiling pot of America most people have been asked “what are you?” when referring to one’s race or nationality. In the short story “Borders” by Thomas King he explores one of the many difficulties of living in a world that was stripped from his race. In a country that is as diverse as North America, culture and self-identity are hard to maintain. King’s short story “Borders” deals with a conflict that I have come to know well of. The mother in “Borders” is just in preserving her race and the background of her people. The mother manages to maintain her identity that many people lose from environmental pressure.

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.

In defining one’s identity, many different factors are considered; such as one’s nationality, characteristic, personality, ability, experience, religion, and etc. Especially for those people who live in America, so called country of immigration, has much more complicated identities than those Asian country people where mixed people are rarely noticed. Thinking about the concept of identity, some people easily categorized themselves as simple factors and terms which could describe their surface; white, black, Asian, European, pretty, ugly, nice, mean and so on and so forth. And that is the most point where majority people stopped to list their identities from exploring more in complicated range. However, there are many people who dig more than common people; one great example would be Denise Chavez, who is the author of the novel called Loving Pedro Infante, who kept asking herself about her identity to approach more accurate and clear ideas. In her work, reader could see the confusion of Tere, the main character of the novel, went through her life as Latin-American female in dealing with finding one’s true identity and how she accept her as who she really is. Denise Chavez, who is obviously Latin-American lady, mirror her own life experience through the character she created and introduce to readers about tough life she lived in America as Mejicana. The main character of this novel have a clear understanding and strong idea about herself throughout the novel, even if

Immigrants’ refusal to appreciate a fused culture promotes division. Mukherjee questions the idea of immigrants losing their culture for American ideals: “Parents express rage or despair at their U.S.-born children's forgetting of, or indifference to, some aspects of Indian culture,” to that Mukherjee asks, “Is it so terrible that our children are discovering or are inventing homelands for themselves?” (Mukherjee, 1997, para. 28). Many immigrants experience anger when their children no longer hold the ideals of their home country. This tension produced within the household hinders the unity within a resident country’s culture and encourages division within families. Using herself as an example, Mukherjee provides another instance of anger directed at her from her own subculture: “They direct their rage at me because, by becoming a U.S.

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.

Two hundred forty-one years. In that small amount of time America forged its self into a vast landscape of different cultures. A combination of numerous cultures mongrelized together to form “We the people” in America today. Due to all the mixing in the pot, an uncertainty about the countries identity arose. For all the beauty that the melting pot brought, it also created a darker side, as aspects of each cultures fought for superiority in the nation. This fight emerges throughout American history and as a new era of deporis rises, the issues are becoming more relevant. In American Dreamer by Bharati Mukherjee, she shares her own experiences as an immigrant and the fight she partook in to have her own American identity seen. Mukherjee’s fight mirrors hundreds of naturalized American citizens who are trying to realize their identity, however it also shines light on native-born Americas struggling as well. The need for a unified American identity produces a nationwide identity crisis.

The Namesake is a fictional novel written by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri’s purpose of the book was to demonstrate a family's hardships moving to a new country, and then their children’s lives as Americanized Bengalis. The audience, in my opinion, was written particularly for an established Americanized American. These Americans are intended to realize little details that newcomers to America worry about, and the life differences that the average American wouldn’t think twice about. She wrote regarding certain factors, specifically the strong Bengali culture, versus the ordinary American culture, and the day to day worries of an immigrant new to America. The author focused on themes regarding family and hardship, but she also incorporates a large

The first sentence of a novel, even a chapter, needs to leave a first impression. Jhumpa Lahiri in her novel The Namesake wields the first sentence in each of her chapters, so they build through her book in a far more significant way than just a first impression. Lahiri uses the first sentence of every chapter to further the plot development by clearly setting new scenes to transition to the new setting and sub purpose of the next chapter. To successfully set her scenes, she uses varying Syntax and rhetorical tools including imagery, short syntax with a focus, and grammatical mistakes.

A cultural identity is something that in a way defines who we are to other people. Cultural and ethnic identity is not only our background, it also showcases our parents and relatives background which connects us through familiarity of customs. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake the question raises, does one’s cultural identity change? In this formal writing I will discuss Ashima’s journey through life and how she came to accept America and its customs.