Extra Credit Blog Post "The Namesake"

In “The Namesake,” Ashima and her husband Ashoke travel to America after their arranged marriage. There, Ashima struggles to acclimate herself to the new country as Ashoke attends a nearby university. As the years pass, they raise a family of two children. Their son, Gogol, struggles to define himself as he grows up in a traditional Indian family in an American world. Eventually, after his father’s death, he sheds his surly and resentful view of his family and their traditions to merge his Indian heritage and his American environment. After doing this, Gogol is able to embrace the intention behind his father’s decision to name him after the famed author Nicolai Gogol.

Before Ashoke leaves Ashima to teach for a semester away from home, he tries to teach Ashima how to drive so that she can function in his absence. The scene where she sits fearfully in the driver’s seat, afraid to drive as quickly as everyone else but anxious to learn reflects her underlying struggle to assimilate herself into American culture that began with her first visit to the laundromat. Ashima’s plight parallels that of Mrs. Sen in Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s.” Just like Ashima, Mrs. Sen feared conforming to the ways of the Americans on the road: “She pressed her foot to the brake pedal, manipulated the automatic gear shift as if it were an enormous, leaky pen, and backed inch by inch out of the parking space” (304). In addition to regarding driving with suspicion, Ashima grappled with the absence of her family and children as they grew up and left her alone in the house. The American definition of family was far more independent than the one she knew in India and she expresses this to Gogol during one of his rare visits. Takaki takes note of this shift in family relations when he includes Dr. Patel’s remark, “’There is a price to be paid for coming here. The family isn’t as close here’” (448).