Importance of Children as Minor Characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Works

Human emotion is the final determinant discerning a good work from a great work, thus a good author will be able to stimulate their readers’ emotions whereas a great author is able to take control and electrify their readers’ emotions. The way an author captures the minds and hearts of a reader while transporting them to a deeper understanding is often unique to that author in particular. Jhumpa Lahiri is an expert who enraptures her readers with complex, sympathetic character development. Each person she creates and chooses to develop in her short stories, no matter how large or small of a role they play, is hugely important to entwining her readers into a profound and empathetic consideration of story theme. The dividing line between what constitutes a major and minor character within literary work is a narrow and often overlapping plane chalk full of inconstancies. The division is largely based off of the unpredictable, perhaps at times even random, nature of human emotion overlaid by author intent. Many authors such as Orson Scott Card of the Writers Digest believe that minor characters are plainly “inconsequential placeholders” ( ), objects who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Although these minor characters are needed to add fullness to the literary piece, more often than not, minor characters share a limited and equal place to the setting: they are an extension of the background. Yet Lahiri manages to shape the small roles of these characters within her short stories it into something significant, intensely layered with thematic meaning, grand in substance. Jhumpa Lahiri is an up and coming extremely successful author: a Pulitzer Prize winner by the age of 32. She is known for her excellently authored...

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...he character flaws found within her main characters. There is no doubt that this author has the ability to clearly remember childhood concerns with critical understanding as well as have a solid focus on using this knowledge to fully develop and reveal the human shortcomings of adult characters who somehow have forgotten how to do this themselves. While depicting both cultural differences and universal truths in the short stories found within “Interpreter of Maladies,” Jhumpa Lahiri illuminates the innocence found within childhood and uses this quality to substantially display the many facets of relationships and marriages that have become exhausted for a variety of reasons. Childhood is used as a major contribution to plot, shedding light not on love’s failures but rather on the opportunities for healing and forgiveness that adults may not always be able to see.