My mother got my name from a book she read in her eighth month of pregnancy. Today, as an English major, I can’t help but think that naming me from a book might have had some sort of unexplained influence over my life. I have always believed that names are very powerful things. As the title of the book would suggest, The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a novel whose central theme is the importance and the power of names. Lahiri shows just how powerful names are by encompassing many of the important themes of the entire novel in the ways her characters are affected by names— their meanings, cultural significances, memory associations, ownership implications, and their abilities to bring people together and also to alienate.
The meaning of Ashoke and Ashima’s names represent the trauma’s that have served to shape their characters. “Ashima means ‘she who is limitless, without borders’” (16). And it is Ashima who makes a huge step in her life moving from her homeland to a place she doesn’t know anything about and is not comfortable in, but she turns it into her home and establishes a family. At the same time she works to maintain a connection and a relationship with her family back home in India. In the end she literally lives a life “without borders” as she doesn’t have an official home and will travel back and forth from America and India. Ashoke’s name means “he who transcends grief” (16). Ashoke not only transcends grief but death itself as he survives a horrific train accident and then gains closure with the trauma by naming his son Gogol thereby turning his grief into something positive.
Culture, the embracing and keeping of, is a very important theme in the novel. Names are very important in Indian culture. “In India parents take their time. It wasn’t unusual for years to pass before the right name, the best possible name, was determined” (25). There are also many rules when it comes to name calling in their culture. Indian children are given two names. Their “good name” which they use “for identification purposes in the outside world” (26) and most importantly they are given a “pet name.” A pet name is like a nick-name, it is used by family and close friends in private and personal settings. The very first time that a cultural reference is made in the novel is through the use (or lack of use) of a name. Lahiri explains how Ashima doesn’t ever use her husband’s good name. “When she calls out to Ashoke, she doesn’t say his name… It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do”(2). It is no coincidence that, through Ashima, Lahiri shows the reader an introduction to Indian culture, because through Ashima the family itself maintains its connection to their heritage. She keeps traditions alive in the home and, often times, even forces her children to celebrate their culture as she organizes celebrations with their Bengali friends and organizing trips back to their homeland.
Not only is keeping culture alive an important theme in the novel but so is keeping memory alive. The name that Ashoke gives to his first son is representative of keeping memory alive through names. The name Gogol encompasses so many memories and experiences of Ahoke’s life. Gogol is the last name of one of the Russian authors that Ashoke grows up reading. It is the name of the author of The Overcoat, the story Ashoke was reading when he had his near fatal accident. And it was a page from that story that saved his life. The fact that his name is so powerful that it can contain all of these important memories becomes apparent to Gogol when his father finally tells him the truth about how he got his name. “And suddenly the sound of his pet name… means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years” (124). Gogol’s name is also a symbol of the how the loss of memory can affect a life. He reflects on how he had changed his name and that only a few people left call him by the name of Gogol. When those people are gone, so will his name and the memories it embodied. “Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so cease to exist” (289). Lahiri writes about a time when Gogol is little and he takes a school trip to a cemetery where they do grave rubbings. The cemetery also shows how names carry on memory. The names on the graves stand as testaments to the lives of the people buried beneath them. Gogol finds himself drawn to the names. “But Gogol is attached to them… these ancient Puritan spirits, these very first immigrants to America, these bearers of unthinkable, obsolete names, have spoken to him, so much so that in spite of his mother’s disgust he refuses to throw the rubbings away” (71). In this way the memories of those dead people live on for a while in Gogol’s mind as he tucks away their grave rubbings in a safe place that his mother can’t get to.
Ownership is another important idea to the family. Many times in the novel Lahiri makes references to who owns
particular objects or who had purchased what. “…his father was wearing… a gray L.L. Bean sweater vest that Gogol and Sonia had gotten him for Christmas one year” (173). More importantly Lahiri uses names to establish ownership. “…the book had been bought used, a stranger’s name, Roy Goodwin, is written inside” (173). Even people can be owned— “…She wears a plastic bracelet with a typed label identifying her as a patient of the hospital” (4). Another way names are used to connote ownership is through the use of nicknames. Like pet names, nicknames are only used by people who are in intimate relationships with one another. Perhaps the best example of this is when Moushumi is given the nick-name “Mouse” by the man she has an affair with. “The nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own” (258). To symbolize how Moushumi never actually turns her whole self over to her husband, Gogol, Lahiri writes, “Only she is not Mrs. Ganguli. Moushumi has kept her last name. She doesn’t adopt Ganguli, not even with a hyphen” (227). Moushumi, in a way, looks at taking his last name as giving herself up to him which, it becomes apparent by the affair, she is not truly willing to do.
One of the powers that names have is their ability to bring people together. Taking a husband’s last name is one way a name can bring two lives together. Also having a general name to describe a group of people is another way. The name “Bengali” refers to an ethnic group. It is the way that Ashima and Ashoke gain support and a kind of second family in America. All these people brought together because they identify with the same name. Another type of name in the novel, an acronym, does this same thing. Gogol attends a talk where he learns the acronym “ABCDs,” “American-born confused deshi” (118). This name is a way to explain a group of people all going through the same thing. “‘Teleologically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question, ‘Where are you from?’’” (118). When Gogol thinks further about this he sees how he too could fit in this category. But he, purposely avoids this group. “He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents chose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share” (119). But when he gets older Gogol feels a special connection to Moushumi because of the fact that she shares that Indian culture he tried so hard as a youth to avoid. At a party one night he feels that bond more than ever when the conversation turns to baby names. As the guest look through a book Gogol thinks about how both he and Moushumi’s names are absent from that book and “for the first time all evening he feels a hint of that odd bond that had first drawn them together” (240). Gogol also feels closer to Moushumi because she knew him when he was still Gogol which is something none of his other girlfriends shared.
As much as names can bring people together they can also alienate them. As mentioned before, Gogol’s girlfriends never knew him as Gogol and this makes it hard for Gogol to every let himself get too close to them. He thinks about how his girlfriend Maxine never really thought about the fact that he was once Gogol, “this essential fact about his life slipping from her mind as so many others did” (156). Because of this and what it represents to him, his relationship with her can not last. Interestingly enough he changes his name because of his sense of alienation he feels that it brings him. He starts to develop this the day at the cemetery. As the kids find last names that match their own “the peculiarity of his name becomes apparent” (68). He starts to feel different from the other kids and becomes embarrassed of his name.
“The sight of [his name] printed in capital letter on the crinkly page upsets him viscerally. It’s as though the name were a particularly unflattering snapshot of himself that makes him want to say in his defense ‘That’s not really me.’” (89)
And because of the embarrassment his name gives him he starts to voluntarily alienate himself from his peers.
Gogol wants to excuse himself, to raise his hand and take a trip to the lavatory, but at the same time he wants to draw as little attention to himself as possible. And so he sits, avoiding eye contact with any of his classmates, and pages through the book. (89)
The way that Gogol seeks to have the confidence to matriculate back into normal society is to change his name. And when he does change it he feels powerful and confident enough to become social again.
In Lahiri’s novel names have all the power to not only change personalities but to encompass all of the themes in her novel. Through the meanings of Ashoke’s and Ashima’s names she shows the central conflicts in their lives, their personal traumas. Through the tradition of naming she shows the importance of maintaining culture and how it can be represented and thrive even in foreign lands. Gogol’s name represents Lahiri’s theme of memory and how it is kept, dealt with and celebrated. Through things like nicknames she shows how names can often signify ownership. And not only proper names, but group names can both bring people together and also serve to make a person feel alienated. I believe that my name coming from a book had a meaningful influence in shaping my love of books. Names are powerful forces and so much can be found in their meanings and their significances, this is what Lahiri wanted to communicated by showcasing names in her novel.
Copyright Megan Tharpe 2005
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