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.
Themes
The Immigrant Experience: Between Two Conflicting Cultures
The main topic of Lahiri’s novel The Namesake deals with the way immigrants to the US conform to their new lives and how they establish a functional connection between their country of origin and their new life in America. Focusing on the Indian Bengali Ganguli family, the author examines how Ashima and Ashoke as first-generation immigrants, adapt to a new culture, and how Gogol, an American-born Bengali, deals with his complex cultural identity.
At the opening of the novel, Ashoke is completing his PhD at MIT, which implies that his status in the US is already established to a certain degree. This allows him to marry a woman his parents have chosen for him, in following with Bengali customs, and bring her to the US. Ashima abandons her studies of literature and arrives to America, feeling a deep sense of dislocation and alienation. As opposed to Ashoke, she has no obligations on which to focus, and as she soon becomes pregnant, she feels trapped in a double state of exile: from her country and from social life. In her eyes, America is at first cold, grey, and inhospitable, and she feels afraid to leave the apartment. In the meantime, Ashoke, to whom the author dedicates less attention, appears to settle peacefully into his new life, his third “birth,” after having survived a catastrophic train accident in India.
After giving birth to Gogol, Ashima finds a new meaning to her life and begins to develop friendships with other Bengali families in the region. Thus, she manages to find a way to bring some of her culture and tradition into the US, and although she misses her family and the sense of community cherished in India, she develops a surrogate family with her Bengali friends who support one another generously, all feeling the same cultural void in America.
We see Ashima and Ashoke’s attempts to bring together the two cultures in raising their children. They introduce Indian customs in the vivid scene of the annaprasan ceremony, the first ritual feeding the baby solid food, in Chapter 2. Simultaneously, they try to help them adapt to American culture, as we see in their Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations beginning in Chapter 3. With time, Ashima begins to grow more accustomed to America, and she even starts working at her local library, developing friendships with Americans for the first time. By the end of the novel, as she decides to spend half of the year in India, her country of origin feels distant and somewhat unknown.
On the other hand, Gogol, although American-born, often feels like he does not belong in the American society. His skin color speaks of his heritage, and his unusual name causes him grief because it does not belong to either culture but feels like a burden. Thus, he decides to change it to a more traditional Bengali name of Nikhil. Throughout the novel, Gogol wrestles with his sense of identity, because he fails to feel a true connection to India, and yet his Indian background makes him feel less American. Tellingly, on his visit to India, Gogol feels safer cloistering himself, much like his mother did when she first arrived in America. This parallel is the first suggestion that Gogol will overcome his feelings of cultural estrangement like his mother does.
We see Gogol’s errant attempts to find a cultural identity in his relationships, trying as he does to conform to an American identity with Max and an Indian American one with Mo. Only through the process of learning the true meaning of his given name, and after roaming the emotional and cultural landscape of his adolescent years, does he learn to accept his true self in the unusual mix of his Indian origin, his American life, and his Russian namesake.
The Importance of Names in Identity
Lahiri utilizes a convenient technique to introduce the name Gogol into the narrative: Having explored Ashoke’s superstitious belief that reading Nikolai Gogol has saved his life during the train accident, the author creates an atmosphere of suspense and tension immediately after his son’s birth. The letter by Ashima’s grandmother, containing the traditionally chosen official name, has failed to arrive, and the parents are pressed to name the child, so Ashoke blurts out the only name that for him carries a deeper meaning. In this way, he presents his child with a lifetime of confusion and uncertainty, both as the one who has decided on living in America and as the giver of a name that singles Gogol out.
The crucial point in Gogol’s attitude toward his name is that he does not understand why he bears it. His father fails to explain it to him as he gives him the book of Gogol’s stories for his 14th birthday because he senses that his son is already distant from his Indian heritage and therefore from the essence of his parents’ identity. Gogol is alone in his attempts to cope with his heritage and his difference from his American friends. Since he additionally bears a Russian name, and not a proper Indian one, he feels doubly betrayed by his parents, and for him, the name becomes the locus of his frustration and confusion. Rationalizing his fears of not belonging fully to either culture by placing the hate onto his name, Gogol both relieves the pressure of his identity crisis and prolongs it, since he fails to come to terms with the real issue of his tension.
As a college student, Gogol finally decides to change his name officially and become the more traditionally Bengali Nikhil. The fact that he chooses an Indian name is telling: He has begun to accept his cultural background, and he feels that it is a necessary part of him. However, Gogol soon realizes that his first name will always remain with him regardless of the change because it has become by now a crucial part of his identity. Lahiri underscores this through the scene in Chapter 5, where Ashoke tells Gogol the story of the accident and Gogol realizes the significance of his name for the first time. Although the mistake lies with his father for not telling him sooner, Gogol feels that he has now betrayed his parents just as he felt they had betrayed him. This revelation further complicates Gogol’s sense of self.
Though Gogol struggles to pinpoint his identity, his identity is always the same. Lahiri gestures at this truth by consistently referring to the character as Gogol even after the name change. Only at the end of the novel, after having come to terms with the disparate parts of his selfhood, does Gogol learn how to accept himself more fully, and through that his name and his namesake, whose stories he begins reading in the final scene.
Searching for Identity in Romantic Partners
Although Lahiri portrays the relationship and marriage of Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli in detail, which is especially evident in the scene where Ashima decides to marry Ashoke just based on the feel and look of his shoes. Since their marriage is an arranged one, their connection does not grow from individual tensions and inner conflicts. Rather, their relationship rests on a gradual learning to understand and know one another. Through detailing that process, Lahiri stresses the positive characteristics of Indian traditions of arranged marriage, especially as she juxtaposes the Gangulis with the relationships their son develops through the novel.
Gogol’s attitude toward the other sex develops fairly late, as he spends most of his teenage years battling against the angst of his cultural identity crisis. In many ways, his love life becomes a reflection of this inner struggle. His first partner, Ruth, is a young woman he has seen around the campus during his first year, then wearing her hair an “emphatic shade of cranberry red, cut to her jaw” (128). Although by the time they meet she has brown hair, Gogol is attracted by how different she is from him. Raised in a commune by hippies, Ruth represents the sort of freedom Gogol has never known. Her sense of self enchants him precisely because he lacks one of his own, and soon Ruth becomes for him an object of fantasy rather than a girlfriend. Lahiri here introduces a leitmotif of Gogol’s attachment to women whose upbringing, character, and selfhood become surrogates for his own lack of stable identity. Ruth fades out of his life after a prolonged stay at Oxford, and this, too, becomes a pattern in Gogol’s life.
Maxine, similarly, comes from a family of affluent New Yorkers, whose carefree lifestyle in a grand townhouse presents a sheer difference from Gogol’s own parents. He longs to belong to Maxine’s family in a way that erases his own heritage, and he neglects his parents to the point where he only thinks to introduce them to Max only because she has asked him. During a vacation in their New Hampshire lake house, Gogol fantasizes about a life that is simple in a purely American way. This is his own version of the American dream, uncompromised by the burden of his cultural legacy. This relationship, too, fades into nothingness, as Lahiri deliberately reveals the ending of their love in an almost off-handed, casual way, signaling that the relationship existed primarily within the field of Gogol’s intrapsychic conflict.
Lastly, through Gogol’s marriage to Mo, both characters attempt to subvert their families’ expectations by fulfilling them on their own terms. Even though they are not aware of it, the marriage is an experiment for both Gogol and Mo in compromising between their ideals and fantasies on the one hand, and the reality of their heritage on the other. As such, their marriage is unable to survive because they both bring to it not love and mutual respect but their inner conflicts and the necessity to calm their individual ambivalences. Once again, Lahiri lets us know of the ending of the marriage only after the fact, as an addendum to Gogol’s continuing journey of self-discovery, emphasizing that it too was a step toward Gogol’s understanding of his identity rather than a realization of mutual love interest.
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