The stories Jhumpa Lahiri includes in her collection, Interpreter of Maladies, are unique because they turn everyday stories of everyday people into something special. She introduces all sorts of characters and simple storylines to really reach out to the readers. One of her most compelling stories is “A Treatment for Bibi Haldar,” in which she portrays the ups and downs of life through Bibi Haldar. Bibi is a lady who is constantly suffering from seizure for no apparent reason and doesn’t have the family she needs to properly help her. Nonetheless, her ability to get back up after suffering and pain and still have a driving hope for a better future, not only grasps the attention of her entire village, but also makes her undoubtedly the most …show more content…
While this isn’t some risky surgery that can end up failing or a treatment that she could not afford at any costs, it is a cure somewhat impossible to find. Bibi Haldar has never been taught how to properly be a woman. She doesn’t know how to prepare a dish for a man and she doesn’t know the proper ways a woman is supposed to talk to a man. Adding to all that, nobody from the village exactly wants to be with someone they think is as unattractive as her. While it does seem like Bibi Haldar is living an impossible life, she does have hope that it will all end right. She is constantly talking about her wedding and exactly how it will be with everybody in the village there. While this is unexpected from someone who is living such a miserable life, readers are given the impression that she is not willing to give up just yet. This is a very powerful characteristic to have in times of need. It even makes her stand to everybody else living in the village. While they talk about how they made Bibi Haldar feel better time to time, they mentioned, “We consoled her: when she was convinced a man was giving her the eye, we humored her and agreed” (167). The villagers realize that she still had hope that she would find a man and they feel it was important for her not to lose that hope. A lot of readers might have been surprised that there weren’t any outside people who were bothered …show more content…
Bori Ma was not the simplest of characters to understand but her lasting impressions on the readers really does make her the most memorable character in collection. Even though instability and pain, she manages to prove the strengths one needs to live through the most suffering moments. It’s important to be strong even when it causes internal damage. It’s important to have hope, even when hope seems to be a fading light. It’s these things that made Boori Ma stand back to her feet during such a cloudy storm. And it’s her ability to calm such a harsh storm that makes her
Innocence ripped away and replaced by premature struggling through life is what outlines Sold by Patricia McCormick. This historical fiction novel follows the story of Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl living in Nepal. Desperately poor, Lakshmi can only enjoy simple pleasures, such as raising her speckled goat named Tali, and having her mother Ama brush and braid her hair. When the violent Himalayan rains tear away all that remains of their cucumber crops, Lakshmi’s maimed stepfather says she must take up a job, for he cannot get work. Lakshmi is introduced to the charming Bajai Sita who promises her a job as a maid in a wealthy area of India. Excited and full of hope to help her family, Lakshmi endures the long trek to India where her journey ends at the “Happiness House.” Soon she learns the frightening truth: she has been sold into prostitution. She is betrayed, broken, and yet still manages to come through her ordeal with her soul intact. Sold depicts a story meant to teach and inspire, making the novel a piece that is highly important for all to see and read.
The short stories in the novel Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat demonstrate the struggles that individuals face and how they react to them. The characters in the stories come from all different backgrounds and experiences but they all seem to share the same sense of suffering and pain. Danticat uses the women in the collections to display the struggles and unhappiness that the people of Haiti faced in the 1960’s. The women, all from different parts of Haiti and also New York, are faced with issues in the work place, in their social lives but most prominently, within their families. Each woman resolves or works to resolve her problems in a complete egotistical and unique way. In Krik? Krak! Danticat uses characterization to display the suffering of the families in Haiti and individualizes every situation to make it of more emphasis. Danticat also uses a large amount of symbolism while trying to portray the significance of the issues being faced. The major theme in Krik? Krak! centers around the diversity of suffering and that even when put in similar situations, every person suffers differently.
The heroine of this tale knows that she is not well, and the fact that medical authorities contradict her self-diagnosis frustrates her. She concedes that her husband should be more knowledgeable than her about her condition. This undermines her self-confidence in being able to evaluate herself.
In the book The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Bilbo, a small hobbit, goes on an adventure with a group of dwarves and a wizard. The goal of this adventure is to retrieve the gold that was stolen from them by the dragon Smaug. Throughout the story, there are many themes that show powerful messages, but there is one theme that is clearly the most important and evident in the book. In the novel The Hobbit, greed is shown as the main theme through setting, plot, and the development of characters.
...rself to be comfortable with who she is. Once she was comfortable with who she is and is able to respect herself, she was able to take certain actions that will get her closer to achieving her goal. Once she became her own master and pleased only herself, she saw herself in a new light. When Gibbons meets with her at the end, she was given another opportunity at a brighter future. A future where she can have a family and be true to her nature. She found a new hope, she was able to have children who will be able to reproduce and giving future windups a new life. In one way creating her own village of windups without patrons. Bacigalupi introduced us with a different perspective on hope, that with hope one can overcome anything no matter if you were not programmed to do. That when someone is comfortable with oneself, nothing anyone says can affect the way one thinks.
The novel focuses on multiple women and their experiences with the practice of bacha posh. The first woman presented
In the beginning, everyone treated her as if she was a helpless girl, and they displayed little to no respect towards her, but once they figured Bibi was “cured”, they began helping her and treating her like she was a real human. People often make assumptions about others without having the full background story, and will not give someone a chance if they don’t fit into the cultural norms. When the town’s people considered Bibi sickly and unwanted, they treated her as such, but when she had the baby and acted as the rest of them did, the people in Bibi’s village treated her like she was one of them, and in a more humane form. Bibi shows how people judge each other based off of what they conceive as normal, and
Margaret Edson’s Wit and Danielle Ofri’s Merced explain about the theme of illness and wellness. Vivian Bearing was diagnosed of cancer in Wit while in Merced Mercedes diagnosis is not found amid different trials, this brings the theme off illness. The theme of wellness is displayed by the way Vivian was taken care by Susie the nurse and E.M Ashford her mentor also Mercedes in Merced was considered and her conditions looked into despite the failures. In both cases the doctors were research oriented and wanted to know more in the field of medicine.
In the short story, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” written by Jhumpa Lahiri, the theme is love and care towards one another will make one’s bond to the world stronger. Lahiri develops the theme by describing Lilia’s awareness about what is happening beyond the world that she is living in. The first example to support this is, “My stomach tightened as I worried whether his wife and seven daughters were now members of the drifting, clamoring crowd that had flashed at intervals on the screen”(Lahiri 6). This illustrates that Lilia cares for Mr Pirzada and his family, worries about him, and wants his family to be safe and protected.
Many people find it difficult to start a new life where everything one believed was right suddenly becomes wrong. Ashima, wife of Ashoke, has moved across the world and feels like a stranger in a new land. “There’s something missing” said Lahiri. The narrator depicted the loneliness Ashima felt away from her home in India (Lahiri 1). Ashima is lost, because her whole life she was made to live life a certain way and now must learn to adapt to new things at an older age. As Ashima became settled in their little apartment in Massachusetts, she became pregnant with her first child Gogol. Gogol was named after the author of his father’s favorite books. When Gogol was born, his mother’s
The fictional gets into the skin of personal and real in Jhumpa Lahiri. Her voice is not intensely autobiographical as in D. H. Lawrence or Dickens but keeps on tapping the deeply realized elements in the growth of relations...
The quest for identity and nostalgic feelings for the country left behind can also be seen in the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri. Jhumpa Lahiri left her country to settle in a foreign land and wife of Ashoke, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake is depicted in similar circumstances . During child birth she suffers remembering the customs and traditions during childbirth in her native place. The sense of alienation deepens when she is at hospital in an alien land with no one whom she and her husband call their own people, no one to share their happiness when they were blessed with a son:
The narrator of the story has an incurable disease and believes that Zaabalwi can heal him
The story had adapt the uses social model approach, the tragedy model and the medical model view was not shown in this story book, since the label of disability or impairment is not mentioned in the text. The use of social model approach for the story book can help
“What is life? Is it a beautiful flower or a bunch of thrones?” (Ghimire 5) The answer to these questions vary from people to people as they experience different situations in their life. The same question is being asked in the autobiography by the writer and tries to answer it on her experience of life. Jhamak Kumari Ghimire is a handicapped woman who cannot do works by her own. She was born with cerebral palsy and performs writing with her left foot. She has received in Nepal the greatest literature prize called Madan prize for her autobiography Jiwan Kanda Ki Phul. In the autobiographic novel, the handicapped writer