In the novel The Namesake by Jjumpa Lahiri, Ashima Ganguli and Ashoke Ganguli, a husband and wife from Calcutta, India move to America. Ashima is pregnant during the transition, and is isolated in Cambridge with no friends of her own, and deeply misses her family in India. Her husband, Ashoke is in graduate school learning, he has made many friends and is very fascinated with America. Throughout the novel, Ashima has more of a difficult time transitioning to American culture than her husband, Ashoke.
Ashoke's transition from India to American is a lot easier than Ashima's due to the fact that he has friends and enjoys learning, and later in the novel teaching; because he enjoys what he does it makes the transition from India a lot easier,…show more content… When Ashima just moved to America it was harder for her socially because she had made no friends; in Calcutta she would have been surrounded by her whole family all the time. Ashima tries to keep her Bengali culture in her American life. She uses a metaphor in the beginning of the novel saying that “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… something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect” (49-50). This metaphor is used to describe Ashima's feelings with regards to being an immigrant is symbolic of her detachment from American culture throughout the novel. As uncomfortable as she feels in America in the beginning of the novel, her feeling of “pregnancy” never seems to leave her completely. At one point in the book Ashima's distress intensifies so great that she firmly speaks out to Ashoke for the first time saying “I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It's not right. I want to go back” (33). As Gogol and Sonia grow up and have desires to eat American food and do American things hurts Ashima, because she has never felt that way in
