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Namesake

Submitted by tomdick on June 26, 2006

Category: Biographies
Words: 2434 | Pages: 10
Views: 1784
Popularity Rank: 1,128
Average Member Grade: N/A (Add a Comment / Grade this Paper)

To Be or Not To Be
Throughout the novel, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, the character Gogol changes in many different ways. One of the most apparent changes was in his “Indian ness”. By “Indian ness” I mean the amount of his parents Bengali ways and traditions that he retained. While growing up he did everything in his power while growing up to stray away from his parents’ Bengali ways. Gogol spent most of his life trying to differ from his parents, however in the end he ends up obeying their wishes as to who he marries. As he was growing up Gogol felt only embarrassment and shame because of his background and because his parents did things differently than his other American friends’ parents. For example, unlike his American friends, while in college Gogol had to return home every other weekend to accompany his parents to their Bengali friends’ parties. Throughout his life he tried to shed his parent’s un-American lifestyle but in the end he succumbed to his past and ancestry.
The first thing that separated Gogol from his parents’ Bengali ways began before he was even born. He was the first child in his parents’ immediate family to ever be born in America. His parents were poor and unstable and this was the life he was brought into. When he was born, the only people who visited him and his mother in the hospital were new friends of Ashima and Ashoke. While still in the hospital, Ashima thinks to herself, “Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true…She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived”(Lahiri 24-25). This was very unlike any other birth ever to take place in either Ashima or Ashoke’s family. I can relate to what Ashima means in the sense that I have two baby siblings and I visited them in the hospital with my other family members many times. Among my visits were trips made by grandmothers,...

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