67 pages • 2 hours read
Jhumpa LahiriThe Namesake
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “1999”
The day of their first anniversary, Gogol and Mo go out to a restaurant Astrid and Donald recommended. Mo feels oddly disturbed and unsettled, and she thinks about her love for Gogol, how “he had accepted her, had obliterated her former disgrace” (294). She finds the restaurant unsatisfactory and small things irritate her.
Two days later, her new teaching semester begins. She has completed her orals and only has her dissertation to complete. As she arrives to the NYU building, she sees an ambulance and soon realizes that Alice, the administrative assistant, suddenly died from an aneurysm. Alone in her department, Mo feels compelled to finish Alice’s duties of sorting the department’s mail. She comes across a letter of inquiry written by Dimitri Desjardins, a man she used to know when she was a teenager finishing high school and he was a postgraduate at Princeton. He flirted with her, but then rejected her, yet for years after he would send her postcards and books he would like her to read until they finally lost touch.
Mo calls Dimitri the following week, and they start having a sexual affair, meeting Mondays and Wednesdays after her class. At first, Mo feels guilty for cheating on Gogol, but soon the excitement takes her, and she begins to enjoy herself, especially as Dimitri makes no demands on her. Gogol suspects nothing, even though she drifts away from him.
After a month, she begins seeing Dimitri on Fridays as well, wondering idly if she is the first woman in her family to cheat on her husband.
Chapter 11 Summary
On a Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, which they have for the first time organized at their apartment, Gogol wakes alone. Mo has gone to a conference in Palm Springs, although he does not remember her ever mentioning one. She is due to return in the afternoon, but the heating in the apartment is broken, so Gogol leaves for his office to finish a project. He feels troubled, as the fourth anniversary of his father’s death is coming, and he feels Mo’s distraction and dissatisfaction. He wonders if he still makes her happy. On his way home, he buys her a travel guide to Italy as a Christmas present, hoping to persuade her to travel there soon. As he arrives home, the doorman informs him Mo has just returned, and he feels excited to have her back.
Chapter 12 Summary: “2000”
The day before Christmas, Ashima is preparing a feast for the last time. At age 53, she has decided to spend half of the year in Calcutta with her family and the other half in America visiting her children and Bengali friends. After 27 years, she has sold the house to a young professor at Ashoke’s former university and his family. As she spends the last few hours in the house alone, she reflects with guilt on Gogol’s recent divorce from Mo and with joy on Sonia’s engagement to Ben, who is half-Jewish, half-Chinese. Now that she is able to return finally to India, the fact that she will miss her life in America dismays her, and she misses her husband.
Gogol waits for his sister to meet him at the train station, having arrived from New York. He remembers learning of Mo’s affair on the same journey the year before after she let slip Dimitri’s name, “her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins” (332). The same weekend she left their apartment for good, and Gogol decided to visit Italy by himself. Now, he feels the deep shame of failure.
At home, the family assembles the fake tree for the last time. They reminisce, and Gogol is aware how his parents have adopted all such customs for the sake of their children. Later, the Bengali friends arrive, and the house fills with laughter. Pensive, Gogol summarizes his existence as a series of coincidences, from his father’s train wreck to his own miscalculated marriage. In his old room, he finds the book of Nikolai Gogol’s stories that his father bought him for birthday, and for the first time sees the inscription: “The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name” (340). Instead of going down to join the party, Gogol stays in his room and begins reading the book of stories.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
In Chapter 10, the perspective switches to Mo and her process of coming to terms with the same ghosts that haunt Gogol. As mentioned in the previous Chapter Analysis, Mo’s way of coping with her complex heritage is more direct, and we see this specifically in this chapter as she takes steps to reacquaint herself with the man she once loved and knowingly enters into an affair with him. Mo’s sense of dissatisfaction does not lie in her marriage to Gogol, but rather in what her marriage has revealed about her: that the fantasy solution she believed would work is simply not functional for her. Marrying Gogol did not marry her conflicting cultural identities. Contrary to Gogol’s overall life passivity, Mo chooses to be proactive, even at her own disadvantage because she equates passivity with her cultural background, especially in her role as a Bengali woman. In this sense, Lahiri emphasizes that Gogol has the luxury of being passively ambivalent about his life because he is a man.
Dimitri for Mo represents another fantasy, one of exotic culture that bears no relation to her own, and of casual emotions that do not bear the weight of responsibility. He also embodies the spirit of elitism and intellectualism to which she has always aspired, as shown in her choice of friends.
Lahiri uses the revelation of the affair to present us with a deliberate anticlimax, as Mo only slips her lover’s name into a conversation with Gogol, and they both know instinctively that their marriage is over—it has been an experiment in fulfilling the fantasy of their families, not their own, and as such it was bound to fail. She leaves his life as quietly as she has entered it, almost leaving no trace, except for a deep sense of failure in Gogol, which in turn has more to do with his own sense of miscalculation and confusion than anything more emotionally charged.
In the final chapter, Ashima prepares to leave for India, in a symbolic completion of a circle of life, since the beginning of the novel is about her arrival in America. She is a woman of young middle age, yet a woman with a rich history that has not always been her choice. She understands, as she prepares to spend more time in India, just how much she has grown accustomed to America in the 30 years of her life there. Through this moment the author reminds us that cultural ties bind us not only to the place from which we come, but also to all places where we settle. Life is an endless process of adaptation and adjustment, and Ashima is now ready to confront a new phase in her life. The notion of multiculturalism is further in evidence through the fact that Sonia will marry Ben, who is half-Jewish, half-Chinese, thus bringing two additional cultures in the melting pot of their version of American life.
As the family gathers in their old house for the last time to celebrate Christmas—a holiday that does not relate to their religion or custom except through the process of assimilation and adoption—their final assembling of the fake fir tree symbolizes the choices Ashima and Ashoke have made to help their children thrive in their country of birth. Gogol’s realization of the sacrifices his parents have made finally allows him to gain a sense of belonging, not to a country or a culture, but to a family and to an emotional bond. Lahiri ends the novel with Gogol reading his namesake’s stories for the first time as a hopeful act of finally accepting his identity.
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