Essential question: How do the following themes impact an Indian family torn between the pull of respecting family traditions and the American way of life?
Themes to consider:
1.clash of lifestyles
2. cultural disorientation
3. the conflicts of assimilation
4. the tangled ties between generations
In class: listening to chapter 8 (disc 7)
accompanying text-based questions. Class handout / copy below.
These will be collected at the beginning of class on Tuesday.
The Namesake Summary for chapter 8
A year after Ashoke's death, Gogol is studying for his registration exam that will allow him to be a licensed architect practicing in New York. He has broken up with Maxine a few months after Ashoke's death, and now she is engaged to someone else. Sonia is still living in the house on Pemberton Road with their mother, who spends her nights awake and lonely, watching TV in bed.
One night, Gogol agrees to go out with the other students in the class he is taking to prepare for his registration exam. He ends up having a good time with a woman named Bridget, who is his age and married. Her husband lives in Massachusetts, and she begins to have an affair with Gogol. They never exchange numbers and he never goes home with her; she always comes to his apartment, just to have sex, not a relationship. Gogol ends the affair when he begins to feel guilty about Bridget's betrayal of her husband.
Gogol's mother encourages him to call Moushumi Mazoomdar, the daughter of family friends whom Gogol has grown up around at family parties. He doesn't really remember much about her, but he calls her anyway and they meet at a bar. They reminisce about their childhoods, which overlapped but not in a way that is significant to either of them. She tells him that she moved to Paris to study French literature, and moved to New York to follow her ex-fiancé, an American named Graham. They go into a French restaurant for a bottle of wine and dessert and decide to see each other again.
A week later, Gogol goes out with Moushumi again, this time for lunch. After lunch, they go for a drink at a place Gogol frequents and the waiter mistakes Moushumi for Gogol's sister. They go into a hat shop so Gogol can buy a hat, since he is not dressed for the cold weather. Moushumi tries on an expensive, fancy hat and Gogol decides to return to the shop to buy it for her later. The next weekend, she invites him over for dinner. They have sex and the dinner she was cooking burns, so they order Chinese food.
Moushumi confides in Gogol that she never liked any of the Indian men who courted her; because she is a woman, the encouragement to get married had been more intense for her. She felt lonely, as if she would never meet anyone to marry. After college, when she went to Paris, she began to have a newfound confidence that allowed her to carry out romantic affairs with many men at once. She fell in love with Graham, an American living in Paris for a year, and returned with him to New York to become a PhD candidate at NYU.
She and Graham had lived together in Manhattan, hiding their romance from her parents. When she finally introduced him to her parents, they had done their best to accept him as a potential son-in-law. Moushumi had proposed to Graham in a taxi in traffic, impulsively. He had said yes and they had gone to Calcutta to meet her extended family. He had seemed at ease with them. They had begun to plan the wedding, which would be Bengali.
A few weeks before the wedding, Moushumi had overheard Graham talking about how unhappy he had been with her family in India. She confronted him about it on the walk home, and it had turned into an awful fight. She threw her engagement ring into oncoming traffic and he moved out soon after, canceling their engagement. Moushumi had taken the rest of the semester off from NYU and mourned, finally returning to school in the fall. It was then that she had met Gogol.
Joyce, Meghan. Wang, Bella ed. "The Namesake Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis". GradeSaver, 21 November 2011 Web. 12 February 2017.
Name______________________________________
Chapter 8 content responses. Please weave in textual evidence and cite.
- Why is Maxine no
longer in Nikhil's life? What has he recently learned from her parents
when he bumps into them in a gallery?
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- Why does Ashima
want Gogol to meet Moushumi Mazoomdar? What does he remember of her when
his mother first mentions her name? What update does Ashima give Gogol on
Moushumi's life?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- How does his
first meeting with Moushumi go?
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- Why is Nikhil
"secretly pleased that [Moushumi] has seen th[e] rooms [of his house
on Pemberton Road], tasted his mother's cooking, washed her hands in the
bathroom, however long ago" (200)?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- How does the
story of the hat bode well for their future relationship?
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- How does Bengali
enter their common language once they start to see one another?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- How was
Moushumi's rebellion at Brown similar to Nikhil's rebellion at Yale?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- How does
Moushumi perceive the breakup of her engagement to Graham as a result of
his being disrespectful to her cultural heritage?
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