The Namesake Character Analysis

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Abstract This paper makes a modest attempt to analyse the various issues faced by the immigrants as portrayed in Lahiri’s novel first novel The Namesake. The story of the novel is set in United States, Calcutta hovers in the background. . It is out of her experiences of the bizarre identity crisis on the part of those who have remained as immigrants and those who were traumatized by homelessness, that the contents of the novel The Namesake were derived. Jhumpa Lahiri admits that as the novel conveys the experiences of alienation of the migrants from their roots, it is to some extent autobiographical. The novel shows how the immigrants face cultural dilemmas in the foreign system Lahiri shows that the immigrants in their enthusiasm to stick…show more content…
Jhumpa Lahiri rapt to the USA at the age of 3 and grew up in Rhode Island. Immersed in migrant culture, she conjointly spent an excellent deal of time in Republic of India, wherever her family created frequent visits to relatives in Calcutta Lahiri’s focus on cultural displacement highlights the Asian Indian immigrant experience from an intergenerational perspective. Whereas Lahiri was still in class, she began consciously examining the migrant expertise, though she was initially seeking to understand her own identity. She used fiction to illustrate the Asian Indian immigrant experience, ranging from conflicts between Hindu and Christian lifestyles to an Indian immigrant’s loneliness and longing for ‘home’. She collected her stories into a book, Interpreter of Maladies that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 [2]. Introduced to the literary world, through her first novel in English, The Namesake which was even converted into a film retaining the title, the Indian diasporic writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, has penned two novels and two short story collections. Jhumpa Lahiri did not belong to the first generation immigrants, and hence, she did not explicitly face with the challenges or loneliness of the exile and the longing for a lost world. But like many immigrant offsprings, she too felt intense pressure to be loyal to the old world and…show more content…
Several critical interpretations will follow of this novel. Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, not only speaks to immigrants but also to the original settles on different levels. It is different from the exotic outpourings of Indian Immigrant writings in English. The Namesake portrays people who need to make sense of their own destinies, in their own terms. The ordinaries of immigrant tales, which project cultural sacrifices, material gain, which was hard earned with perpetual adjustment, make The Namesake a fresh and worthy contribution to literature. Lahiri steers away providing easy answers, offering readers a complex look into the immigrant experience. Her handling of the complexities of immigrant experience is a simple but a very mature manner of a mature fiction
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