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The Namesake, A Literary Analysis

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Throughout many of the different novels that we have read in class we are able to see how asian americans strive to find their own identities and how there was a challenge between the American culture and the achievement of social equality for own racial group. Asian American who becomes assimilated in American culture had to pay the price for such a desire. Figuring out one’s identity is big issue, for immigrants especially for 2nd generation of Asian Americans who feel neither native Asian nor American. Asian American tried to fit them into the majority ‘American culture’ instead of their own culture and conflict with their order generations. For the minorities, America is still a place which have to give up many of own uniqueness and struggle to fit in for their comfortable. Minority races and cultures tried to find a new place in America where they can fit …show more content…

In the book, “The Namesake,” Gogol, the protagonist is a son of first-generation immigrants to the U.S. from India who is tasked with living the double life, fitting in with the culture of his parents as swell as the culture of U.S. Although Gogol struggles to find an identity, his struggle is based on the fact that he cannot fully be Bengali or American. Therefore he has to find a bridge between the two identities, which is the same struggle for many second generations. "For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.”(49

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