Namesake Reflection
While reading Namesake, there were three reflections that I could make from the story. One reflection is that the story is very similar to my life, second, it seems like it is foreshadowing the separation of the culture in the future, and third, that hardships are needed to live in a foreign land. Most of my life had been spent at foreign lands and because of that, the language, culture, actions, and behaviors differ a lot from the Koreans that lived at Korea for most of their lives. That relates with Namesake because in the story, Nikhil, or otherwise known as Gogol, spends his whole life at America while his origin is Indian. We can see by his development throughout the novel that he is getting further and further from
his original culture, and he is slowly trying to deny it. I do not know if I would become to deny the Korean culture, but maybe my future might be very similar to either Gogol or Somali’s futures.
The second reflection I would make would be that the novel is foreshadowing the separation of cultures of Indians and Americans in the Ganguli family. The parents are full fledged Indian and while Gogol is almost full fledged American. We do not know about Somali yet because she is not fully aware yet. Throughout the story, we can see that Gogol is starting to deny the fact that he is an Indian. One example of his denying would be how he thinks of his name. He hates his name because of the weird saying and how the friends always teasing about it, and he also states that he would rather have an American name than his. He does not consider the name with meaning, which is what his parents did and would want him to do also.
Living on a foreign land with totally different language, culture, and custom is really difficult according to the story and from my experience. In the story, Ashoke and Ashima moves from India to America, where many things are different. Ashoke could speak English but Ashima couldn’t so she couldn’t make any friends and she had a hard time raising her child in a barren land. According to Indian tradition, families would gather together and they would help her to raise her child, but since she was at America, that was not a possible choice. Since I learned English from when I was young, I did not have a difficult time communicating, but adjusting to the new place was difficult for me. I can not imagine having to raise a child in a foreign place where you can not communicate well.
