Monday, February 6 chapter 5 review The Namesake

All work has been put into parent connect. Please check that I have not made any errors. If you had a legal absence, as noted by the office, you have 10 days to make up the work.  You will then potentially receive full credit. However, any late work that now has a zero may be turned in for 50 points, which is significantly better than the zero that is in there now. 


In class:  please turn in your content responses to chapter 5. 

Review of chapter 5

Chapter 5 extension: personal response to excerpt from text. (class handout / copy below) DUE AT THE START OF CLASS ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7

1. Where does Gogol pursue his undergraduate studies?

Gogol will start "his freshman year at Yale" (97).

2. What decision does Gogol make about his name before 

leaving home?

Gogol has learned that "plenty of people changed their names", so he decides to change his (97). 

3. What reasons does Gogol give his parents for this decision?

Gogol tells his parents ""it would be the same name they'd 

chosen for him when he was five" (99).

4. What courses does Gogol take in his first semester at college?

The first four classes that Gogol registers for are "Intro to the History of Art, Medieval History, a semester of Spanish [and] Astronomy", ...[but] at the last minute he registers for a drawing class in the evenings" (104). 

Why doesn't he tell his parents about the fifth course he takes

 in drawing? What kind of career are they hoping he will

 choose?

Gogol does not tell his parents, as they would "consider the class frivolous" (1040 and would prefer him to pursue a profession that would earn him "security and respect" (105).

5. To what field does this drawing class lead him? Why? Gogol 

"falls in love with the Gothic architecture of the campus [and is] always astonished by  the physical beauty that surrounds him" (108). 

This leads him to want to study architecture.

6. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in his sophomore 

year, whom does Gogol meet on the train between New Haven 

and Boston? Why does he find his own upbringing "bland" 

(111) in comparison with hers? What ensues after Thanksgiving break?

Gogol meets Ruth, a fellow student from Yale, who "was raised on 

a commune in Vermont, the child of hippies [and] was educated at

home until seventh grade" (110).  "He cannot imagine coming 

from such parents", so feels his own upbringing is "bland" (111). 

After the break, "he begins to meet her after classes" (113) , they

 "study together in the library"(114) and in time become a couple.

7. How does Sonia, "revealing a confident, frequent, American 

smile" now that "her braces have come off her teeth" (107), 

seem to be more American than Gogol was at that age?

Sonia asserts her independence from her family and behaves

like a typical American adolescent. "She doctors her jeans,and 

"dyes the majority of her clothing black"(107). She argues 

violently with Ashima, unlike her brother who acquiesced to 

his parents' wishes.

8. How does Gogol's meeting with his cousin Amit give us a 

clear view of his conflict with his cultural identity?

Gogol learns about the "term ABCD ...[which] stands for 

American-born confused deshi"(118).  Gogol does not see himself as confused, for he "never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India" (118). 

9. Why does Gogol spend Thanksgiving of his senior year alone

 with his father?

Gogol "and Ruth are no longer together",(119) as "his mother and Sonia [had] gone to India for three weeks, to attend a cousin's wedding (121). 

10. What happens on Gogol's train ride to Boston that makes 

Ashoke tell Gogol the full history of the reason for his name?

 How does he react to the story? How does his father assure 

Gogol that his name has always had a positive association in his

 mind despite the tragedy that brought it into being?

"A suicide had been committed, a person had jumped in front

 of the train " (122). His father "tells Gogol the story of the train he'd ridden twenty-eight years ago [and] the "book that had saved him"(123). Gogol feels that he "has been lied to all these years (123).  His father assures Gogol that his son reminds him "of everything that followed" (124).

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Excerpt response for chapter 5  due Tuesday, February 7

Name_________________________________    Writing response to The Namesake chapter 5  minimum 150 words

Directions: please read the chapter excerpt and respond to the prompt.

“He tells him about the night that had nearly taken his life, and the book that had saved him, and about the year afterward, when he’d been unable to move.

            Gogol listens, stunned, his eyes fixed on his father’s profile.  Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know.  A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way.  He imagines his father, in his twenties as Gogol is now, sitting on a train as Gogol had been, reading a story, and then suddenly nearly killed.  He struggles to picture the West Bengal countryside he has seen on only a few occasions, his father’s mangled body, among hundreds of dead ones, being carried on a stretcher, past a twisted length of maroon compartments.  Against instinct he tries to imagine life without his father, a world in which his father does not exist.

……    ‘Why haven’t you told me this until now?’
            ‘It never felt like the right time,’ his father says.
            ‘But it’s like you’ve lied to me all these years.’  When his father doesn’t respond, he adds, ‘That’s why you have that limp, isn’t it?’
            ‘It happened so long ago.  I didn’t want to upset you.’
…………

‘I’ve always meant for you to know, Gogol.’

And suddenly the sound of his pet name, uttered by his father as he has been accustomed to hearing it all his life, means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years.  ‘Is that what you think when you think of me?’  Gogol asks him.  ‘Do I remind you of that night?’

            ‘Not at all,’ his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now.  ‘You remind me of everything that followed’” (123-124).

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Have your parents or someone close to you ever concealed information from you that you believed you should have always known?  Did you resent their having withheld this information?   Did they seem like “strangers” to you at the time that they revealed this “secret?” Did this situation bring you closer to them or distance you from them even more?  Was its outcome reassuring, upsetting, or reassuring and upsetting? 

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