From Confusion To Self-identification

Jhumpa Lahiri is a celebrated contemporary Indian American writer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for her first short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies. The Namesake, her debut novel, is a major international bestseller which has been translated into several foreign languages and has earned worldwide readership and critical attention.The Namesake follows the trials of a newlywed couple who immigrate from India to America. Lahiri's stories revolve around the tangled relationships, hard communication among kinsmen and a loss of identity of those in diaspora. The feelings of exile and the struggles between the two worlds, by which those immigrants are torn, frequently haunt the characters in Lahiri's works. This thesis attempts to explore the theme of initiation in Lahiri's The Namesake and trace the protagonist's dynamic and cross-cultural growth.This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter serves as an introduction to Jhumpa Lahiri, her literary achievement and initiation theory. Chapter Two, Chapter Three and Chapter Four analyze Gogol's initiation. The theme of initiation is explored from the following three aspects: Firstly, as an individual person, Gogol defines himself and becomes a self-identified person after going through the name confusion and name struggles; Secondly, as a man, Gogol forms responsible and serious attitudes towards love, family and career after experiencing the frustration and misfortune of love, family and work; Thirdly, as a second generation immigrant, Gogol finds his sense of cultural belonging after undergoing conflict and confusion between cultures. The last chapter concludes the whole thesis with a summary of all the arguments and viewpoints in the previous chapters. I believe Gogol's dynamic initiation proves that human beings are in need of a multi-cultural society, which demolishes the cultural hegemony.