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¶ … Maladies
In Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" short story, her depiction of characters and use of short story plot line is perfect for the short story that tells the tale of an American family traveling in India. They are Indian-Americans, and appear just like any other tourists from America, without knowledge of most Indian ways and customs, even though they have Indian parents who now live in the country. Her depictions of the characters are perfectly believable and quite realistic, from the Indian tour guide who notices much detail about the American family, to the dislocated mother who is totally interested in herself, and takes no notice of anything or anyone around her. These could be Americans from anywhere, and the fact that they are Indian, only makes the story's plot more interesting and rich.
The cultural significance for immigrants is quite clear in this story (and many of the others). The immigrants lose their culture, whether willfully or without their knowledge, and become strangers in their own country when they return. The Das family is self-centered and quite unmoved by the things they see around them - they are typical "ugly" Americans who have no interest in their background or culture. They seem bored by the tour, and by each other, and the reader has to wonder why they bothered to take the trip in the first place. They seem to think they are "superior" to their surroundings, somehow, simply because they are from America and have more opportunities and a different lifestyle. The author uses the symbols of the Chandrabhaga River and the Temple of the Sun as symbols of a culture that is slowly dying because people like the Das family do not keep it alive. This is actually a sad story because it illustrates how few ties most immigrants keep with their home countries, and how Americanized and selfish they become. The Das family really learns nothing from their trip to India, when it could have been a real cultural awakening for the entire family.
Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri Both Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent" tell stories about the cultural clash between eastern cultures and the western world of the United States. This is not the only point of similarity between these two women or their writing styles. Besides the fact that they were second-generation immigrants, both women had mothers who wished them to hold onto their heritage
Real Durwan] From their earliest beginnings, humans used storytelling to enlighten and affect emotion. Envision a scene in the French Caves of Lascaux 17,000 years ago: The family huddles around the fire. The father embellishes his conquests with wall drawings of wooly rhinos and elephants. The children listen with rapt attention. With frugality of words, expert narrators transform new characters and environments into old friends and situations. Pulitzer Prize winner
In "The Third and Final Continent," the protagonist is a young Bengali man lodging with an ancient American woman in New York, and her repeated comments to him are at once evidence of extreme ethnocentrism and yet spur the protagonist on to the development of his own identity within the confines of his adopted culture. One of the things his American landlady repeats to him on an almost daily basis
maladies, tracking treatment theme (2) Lahiri's stories. You: "A temporary Matters" Product of Problems Children play a very important role in the many tales that are found in Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in which frequently "the pang of disappointment turns into a sudden hunger to know more" (Crain 1999). However, this fact is most noticeable, and perhaps most dire to the plot of the stories "A
When I was putting the collection together, I knew from the beginning that this had to be the title story, because it best expresses, thematically, the predicament at the heart of the book -- the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves" ("A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri," From a Reader's Guide for Interpreter of
Mr. Kapasi and the Dases are all Indian, but in the interpreter's eyes, Mr. And Mrs. Das are foreigners because they dress and speak like Americans. Mina Das sees Kapasi not as a romantic partner, as he desires her to see him as, but as a kind of romantic confessor, who will wash her clean of her sins, much as the citizens of Thebes see their king. Eventually, when Oedipus'