The Namesake

Ashima is Gogol’s mother and the second most established character in the novel. Hers is the original centered consciousness, because she is about to give birth to Gogol at the novel’s open. The novel focuses on Ashima’s sense of displacement in America, her loneliness and isolation as a stark contrast to her previous life in India where she was surrounded by her family and friends. Ashima is a tall and stately woman, 21 at the time of her arrival to her new home, and although she has not completed her studies of literature before marrying Gogol’s father, she is intelligent and curious. This makes her adaptation process to her new life even harder because she does not know anyone, and she fears the foreign culture.

Over the years, Ashima will undergo a profound change of character, and she will grow into a mature woman who has found useful ways to assimilate to her life in America. As a younger woman, she creates a circle of other Bengali families with whom she shares the customs and traditions she knows and loves. Yet, over time, she starts first to volunteer and then work part-time in her local library. There, she makes her first American friends. After her husband’s premature death, she grieves for the man for whom she has developed profound love and respect, and then she makes a choice to sell her house and in the future spend half of the year in India and half in America, bringing the two cultures and ways of life together in a new way. She is a strong woman, and she faces the difficulties of immigrant life with determination to ensure for her family, and especially her children, a life of success and dignity.

Ashoke is Gogol’s father. He’s the direct reason Gogol is born in America and why Gogol bears his unusual name. As a young boy, Ashoke spends a lot of time with his wise grandfather, who teaches his to appreciate Russian writers and the truths they reveal in their works. He grows into a serious young man, doing his studies at a Bengali college. At age 22, he nearly loses his life in a horrific train accident. Ashoke comes to believe that the only reason he has survived the crash that has killed his fellow passengers is that he stayed up late reading a book of stories by Nikolai Gogol. As he spends a long year in recovery, Ashoke reexamines his life so far and decides that he must use his miraculous second chance to create a new life of opportunity for himself and his future family. He decides to pursue a PhD in America, enters into an arranged marriage with Ashima, and brings his bride to the States.

Ashoke is a man who does not pay much attention to details in life, always seeing the bigger picture. He cares for his wife, but he never dotes on her, and he dedicates himself fully to his work so that he can support his family. By the time Gogol and Sonia are born, he is already a side-character in the family life: there to offer support and encouragement, but often absent for work. It is during one of his longer absences that Ashoke suddenly dies of a heart attack, his life journey abruptly and anticlimactically ended.

The single mistake Ashoke has made is not sharing in time the origin of Gogol’s name with his young son, which might have helped Gogol deal with his identity crisis. However, after his passing, his family remembers the man with love and much respect, feeling deeply his loss.

Mo is another character that briefly takes over the narrative as centered consciousness. She is the daughter of the Gangulis’ Bengali friends, a young woman Gogol’s age who is pursuing a PhD in French studies at NYU. She is slender of build with feline features, and she dresses smartly in European fashion. Ever since her teenage years, she has rebelled against her family’s desire to pigeonhole her into the role of the traditional Bengali woman, and she instead chooses to immerse herself into a wholly different cultural experience. She moves to France, determined never to come back, but there she meets an American banker whom she decides to marry. However, once she realizes that the man does not have respect for her heritage (the one she herself has rejected), she calls the wedding off at the last moment. This shows Mo as a woman who does not feel comfortable in her own skin, and in that sense, she parallels Gogol and his crisis of identity. However, Mo’s choices are more radical and more escapist than Gogol’s.

Her decision to marry Gogol stems from an attempt to prove to herself that she can marry a Bengali and yet not become the traditional woman her parents have brought her up to be. The marriage is doomed to fail because both Mo and Gogol have entered into it for wrong reasons: The relationship is their experiment in bridging the culture gap and finding a workable solution to their crises, but they both must travel their own individual journeys to self-discovery without using psychological surrogates.

Mo thus consciously implodes the union by rekindling a romance with an older man she has known since she was a teenager. She does not even attempt to persuade herself that there is a rational explanation for her act, and as soon as Gogol finds out about it, she leaves their flat and divorces him. The author allows Mo simply to disappear from the narrative because, even while she is part of it, her character possesses no fixed traits, and her presence serves only as an object of fantasy for Gogol.