Intro to Lit Blog

The Namesake, Chapters 4-6

I really enjoyed the first three chapters of this book. It allowed me to see what it is like to be a foreigner in America. The author also does a great job making her characters seem real. Like Saturday, the characters often drift into a flashback while thinking about a present day experience and we get to know these characters and understand them better because we get to see what has happened in the past. I mention this because at first I didn't like chapters 4-6 of this book. As Gogol becomes the main character, the story switches gears and becomes a story about growing up instead of being a foreigner. Instead of being something new, the story turned into something that I personally have experienced – I know what it's like to grow from an adolescent into a young adult. What makes this book interesting, but is something I really didn't notice until Chapter 6, is that Gogol distances himself from his family not only because he wants to be independent, but because he doesn't want to be different – he doesn't want to be Indian.

At the beginning of Chapter 4, Gogol's parents (who now seem strange and distant to the reader, as Gogol seems them) are throwing him a birthday party, but the attendees are all of his parent's Bengali friends. On page 92 he is horrified as Mr. Lawson, his English teacher is telling the life story of Nikolai Gogol. He is so embarrassed by his odd name and its association with the strange author that he covers his ears. Events such as these convince him to change his name to Nikhil before he goes to college, where he is away from his parents for the first time. While he's in college he falls in love, goes to parties, chooses a career, and slowly distances himself from his parent and his heritage.

That is the aspect of the story that captured my interest. He acts like an average college student trying to be an adult, but that isn't how he was raised. He goes against almost everything his parents ask him to do, but the author presents Gogol's decision as a regular kid trying to get away from his parents. The best part about this is that Gogol himself doesn't realize he is really distancing himself from everything that makes him different. This becomes especially apparent after he meets Maxine and lives with her family. They are so different than his family that he immediately falls in love with them and how they live their lives. He wants to be just like them. He wants to go to the lake every summer. On page 155 he thinks, “He feels no nostalgia for the vacations he's spent with his family, and he realizes now that hey were never really true vacations at all. Instead they were overwhelming, disorienting expeditions, either going to Calcutta, or sightseeing in places they did not belong to and intended never to see again.” Those trips were very important to his parents as they tried to hang onto their culture and expose their children to it. It made me sad to see Gogol so eager to dismiss it and to interpret everything cultural his parent have done as strange and troublesome. I think Gogol will have a change of heart though. At some point he might realize that in an effort to fit in, he has pushed away everything that his parents once loved. The fact that the narrator still refers to him as Gogol makes me think that is how “Nikhil” thinks of himself too.

posted by rcunning @ 5:20 PM