Quest for Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on the means by which the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Novel The Namesake deal with their identity crisis and how they handle the trauma and possible success, failure or resistance of subjects who in their confrontation with the culture of the other negotiate their new identities. Lahiri’s literary works are concerned with the diasporic postcolonial situation of the lives of Indians and Indian-Americans, who are caught between the Indian traditions that they have left behind and a totally different western world that they have to live in, culminating in an ongoing struggle to adjust between the two worlds of the two cultures. Concerned mostly with the disappointment, failure and at-times success of Indian immigrants in America, Lahiri’s works abound with male and female characters who, on being displaced, struggle to survive in the unfamiliar surroundings they are entangled in. All her works deal with the common motif of exclusion, loneliness and the search for identity and fulfilment.