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Of Migration In Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

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Recommended: Immigrant culture of the US

In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri explores the theme of migration and displacement with her typical poetic style and immense emotional involvement. Most of the stories in the book are often dominated by an omnipresent sense of loss and insecurity. The process of self-reconstruction portrayed from generational viewpoints occupies the central space in the collection. Lahiri contemplates on alienation of her protagonists mostly resulting in psychosis and frustration. Lahiri questions the social and cultural implications of Indian immigrants as part of a minority that thrives in the United States and highlights a new American identity for them. Her estranged characters, engaged in the conflict to balance two different worlds, enable us to understand the complexities and existential confusion of the immigrants in the new land of settlement. Yet, Lahiri emphasises the necessity of creating a transnational identity to overcome these complexities. Lahiri elucidates the problem of alienation associated with race and identity. Lahiri presents her individuals in Unaccustomed Earth in an irascible manner. The restlessness of these individuals may rightly be interpreted in terms of their frantic …show more content…

She has made the tales of human idiosyncrasies thought provoking and soul searching. She is a true artist in a sense that as an author she plays an interpreter. By interpreting life, she provides a chance to the readers to comprehend life as she has perceived. Being either ambassador or refugee in a foreign ambience both writers and ordinary people represent the India which is unseen by native Indian. Unaccustomed Earth (2008) depicts the displaced immigrant protagonists of second-generation Indian American characters struggling for a identity and trying to fit into a community. Living in a land not belonging to them, these characters often feel alienated from the places in which they should be able to feel at

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