Jhumpa Lahiri Themes

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In all her works Jhumpa Lahiri has dealt with the themes of culture identities and the problems of generation – of Indian parents and their children growing up in America while facing challenges of coping with the demands of their parents who are nostalgic about things and memories Indian and the pressures of American life and that society’s ways and norms. These conflicting norms and values as regards life’s important affairs like love and marriage find very effective expression in her stories – both short and long. In the treatment of these themes she looks for cross-culture marriage and even there she explores the possibility of accommodation and adjustment and thereby the happiness of home and family. Several writers in our days generally deal with themes of broken families, women’s emancipation-related tales of oppression and sexual violence or of gendered identity explained as colonial/postcolonial experiences, expectations and encounters, and culture conflicts due to East-West encounters. Jhumpa Lahiri seems instead not to bother for what is in currency, what sells today-hers being a systematic purpose to tell her readers that life demands understanding, maturity and marital success leading to the creation of a happy home. It may be this leading concern behind Lahiri’s art that make her stories immensely readable and she loads them with a virtue of a different kind. Given the obvious compulsion on her part to priorities the dominant concern in the multicultural world today for a home that guarantees happiness and comfort of existence as civilized individuals, she finds the theme of happy home and intellectual adjustments in life and in love quite a natural choice on which she could concentrate. Moreover, in our days when n...

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...e set in the paragraphs which make the stories lively. Beyond putting appropriate diction at appropriate places, she has the god-given virtue of contriving excellent plots with excellent characters.

The most important factor of Jhumpa’s narrative technique is the graceful variation which does away with repetition of events or concepts in the plots. Her concerns in The “Namesake” are engrossing and filled with moral and psychological truth. Its other qualities are flexibility, elegance, economy, irony, compassion and eloquence. In Unaccustomed Earth Jhumpa shows she matures techniques in narration and plot construction. Every word assumes significance and language bears lucid and lyrical vitality. Alienation, nostalgia, yearning for the native land and the annoyance and mental agony resulting from them has been recurrently exposed in the stories.

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