Ashima And Gogol Relationship

Relationships between friends and family helps a person shape their identity to who they want to become. Different generations all have different knowledge and their interactions with each other help shape who they become as an individual. The relationships between the different generations show the quest Ashima and Gogol went onto finding their identity, in America. In the novel, The Namesake written by Jhumpa Lahiri shows the interactions between generations and how they affect each other.

Ashima spent her whole life as a child surrounded by her family, by sleeping in the same room as her parents, then sharing the same bed with Ashoke. First as her parents’ daughter, and then as Ashoke’s wife, and later as Gogol and Sonia’s mother. She had

She tries to re-create familiarity with re-creating a traditional dish that she used to get at a train station in India by combining “…Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl,” (Lahiri 1). She tried to re-create a traditional dish with the unfamiliar ingredients she could not find in America. This was her initial start in trying to find herself in a place where she can no longer associate herself with anything. After Gogol was born her first instance of finding herself was her associating herself with Gogol, she left the house and explored the area she was in, stepping out of her comfort zone. By the time Gogol was in grade three, they were put in “Bengali language and culture lessons every other Saturday” (65), at this point Ashima still could not identify herself without associating herself with her parents back home and her kids. Her culture is still a part of her and she wanted to make sure the culture she grew up with gets passed on to her kids. When Gogol was coming back during a weekend visit, he called his dorm his home and Ashima was shocked. It had been twenty years on Pemberton Road and Ashima still cannot call it home, as easily as Gogol called his dorm home. This initial incident shows how connected she is to her