The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, follows the Ganguli family through their transition into the American life. Ashoke Ganguli, after suffering in a train accident that should have ended his life, married Ashima and moved to the United States. After living in Boston for nine months Ashima finds out she is pregnant. Another nine months later and her first child, a son, is born. The Gangulis were waiting for a letter from Ashima’s grandmother in order to name the baby, but they could not be released from the hospital without a name on the birth certificate so they give him the name Gogol, a pet name until they can think of a good name for him. This name becomes all that he hates about himself and eventually decides to change it, though he doesn’t know the true reason he was given the name; a book by Nikolai Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life after the train accident.

Throughout the book Gogol struggles with self-identity; he loves his parents and their background, but he’s an American and he doesn’t understand why they make him suffer through their old traditions. He doesn’t feel connected to the traditions that his parents continue to perform, he didn’t grow up near his real extended family and only adopted the friends his parents had made as his honorary aunts and uncles. So everything he experienced was second hand and he disliked when his parents made him accountable to their traditions.

He felt like his life was surrounded by accidents, mishaps, which should never have happened; all starting with the day that his father survived the train accident in India. That led to his limp and his desire to move as far as possible from where his family’s life was, and that led to his life in America. The letter with his real name was lost in the mail, an accident that led his parents to name him Gogol, the name that he despised. “He had tried to correct that randomness, that error. And yet it had not been possible to reinvent himself fully, to break from that mismatched name” (pg. 287). He then had different relations with women to try and become a different person, to break away from who his parents wanted him to become. Then his father died, “that had been the worst accident of all.” And yet, all of these accidents and events formed Gogol, “shaped him, and determined who he is” (pg. 287).

We all endure things in life that we may want to go back and change, to see how our life would be different after a certain accident was fixed. Sometimes things happen that we can’t even comprehend, and those things we wish to forget; to erase from our memories altogether. Gogol surely experienced the desire to change things when his father died. He regretted changing his name from Gogol, even though the name caused him pain when he was younger, it was the only thing left connecting him to his father, and he didn’t have it anymore. These things in life that maybe should never have happened, they “seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end” (pg. 287). Those little things in life that seem wrong and difficult to understand are often the things, or accidents that define who we are.