Analysis Of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake And Unaccustomed Earth

Many authors have captured the experiences that immigrants face when migrating to a new country. In her works The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri highlights the struggles of assimilation that immigrants from South Asian countries, particularly India, face when migrating to America. Lahiri focuses on the differing experiences between immigrant parents and their American-born children. Lahiri's works serve to educate Americans and provide immigrants with literature that they can relate to.

The Namesake opens with Ashima, an immigrant who moves from India and has been living in America for eighteen months. Her journey to the new country begins when her husband, Ashoke, decides to move to the States to pursue a degree in fiber

To Ashima's disappointment, they move away from the city to a suburban neighborhood. They are the only Bengali couple around and that causes them to feel further isolated. Ashima believes that "being a foreigner is a sort of life-long pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a continuous feeling out of sorts" (Lahiri, The Namesake 49). She constantly awaits a sense of belonging but that never comes for her. Ashima is further agitated by the fact that she is so far away when tragedy befalls her family in India. The first bad news that she receives is that her grandmother has become senile, followed by the news of her father's death. After both incidents, "Ashima is inconsolable for days" (Lahiri, The Namesake 38). One day, she gives Ashoke an ultimatum and tells him, "I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It's not right" and that she wants to go back to India as soon as Ashoke finishes his degree (Lahiri, The Namesake 33). Ashoke looks at Ashima "aware that her life in Cambridge has already taken a toll...feeling that it is his fault, for marrying her, for bringing her here" (Lahiri, The Namesake 33). Despite his awareness of his role in his wife's unhappiness, he does not agree with her desire to leave because he believes that he will live in India with regret if he departs America. As shown, "immigration motherhood is presented not as a means to better integrate into the new land...but,

At age five, Gogol is ready to enter school and his parents decide that he cannot be called by his "pet" name. Therefore, they give him a "good" name, Nikhail, which still has ties to the author Gogol because his first name was Nikolai. They register Gogol as "Nikhail" for school but, Gogol is not used to the name and the principal allows him to continue being called Gogol instead. The fact that the school administrators are allowed to ignore parents' wishes shocks Ashima and Ashoke, but they do not pursue the matter. The seemingly insignificant decision that Gogol makes as a boy follows him throughout his life. As a boy, Gogol possesses no particular affinity or animosity towards his name; it simply is his name. However, when he reaches age thirteen, "the peculiarity of his name becomes apparent" (Lahiri 68). One day, while on a class trip to the cemetery, Gogol and is peers are told to observe the gravestones around them. Gogol cannot shout in excitement with his peers when they find their names on the gravestones. In this moment, his name isolates him. From that day forward "his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically" (Lahiri, The Namesake 76). After Gogol learns in class one day that he was named after a man "whose life was a steady decline into madness" he is even further humiliated (Lahiri, The