Identity In The Namesake Theme

When a child becomes an adolescent, they will start trying to figure out their own identity. They may try new things or stick to the ballet lessons that their mother put them in since the age of five. Identity is more than just what one does or will do, it also covers one’s name, culture, and heritage. Throughout Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, the protagonist has struggled with creating his identity. Lahiri presents the struggle to create identity in the novel in order to emphasize how it isn’t easy to be set with one label.

In the beginning, the parents were waiting for a letter from India for a name to be chosen. In the hospital, the parents struggled to figure out a name for the protagonist until they realize that they couldn’t leave the

Through his years in college, he has dated a number of girls under his new name Nikhil. He turns into a different person under his new name. He had a nice relationship with Maxine, his second girlfriend until Gogol’s father died, and Gogol had to practice their Bengali with the rest of his family. After that, Maxine couldn’t take that and they broke up, a result of the struggle to create an identity between the two cultures. He later married a girl named Moushimi. They divorced after Gogol finds out that Moushimi had another affair. As Moushimi wanted to break away from her Bengali customs, Gogol wanted to embrace them again. This shift from abandoning to embracing his own culture is also a way Lahiri presents the struggle of creating an identity. In the end of the novel, he finally picks up the book he also abandoned that was given to him by his father on his fourteenth birthday. He starts to read it and knows that by changing his name, he becomes a different person, and that the name Gogol is dead while under his new name, Nikhil, lives on. This reflection of his name change presents another struggle of the creating of Gogol’s identity along with his culture. He never wanted to just stick to one identity almost like what Gogol did during the rice ceremony. Using cultural identity and name, Lahiri emphasized how it isn’t easy to be set with one