Identity In The Kite Runner And The Namesake

Focusing on the pressing issue of what it is like to be a first generation American, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri both successfully tackle the reality of an immigrant’s struggles of facing stereotypes, social class issues, relationships, family, and crises of identity. The way these novels address these issues are as diverse and different as their protagonists’ lives unfold. In The Kite Runner, the protagonist, Amir, deals with the life shattering event of watching his friend, Hassan, be raped. Since he does not get acquire the courage to intervene, this event effects Amir’s relationships and his sense of identity. Gogol, the protagonist in The Namesake, also deals with an unstable sense of identity in

As a child, Gogol was always dragged back to India to visit his grandparents and other family for a couple of months every year. This, while exposing Gogol to Bengali tradition in India, does not help with bringing him closer to his parents, who grew up in a substantially different way than him. Lahiri shows Gogol’s parent’s transition of moving to another country effectively by focusing on specific things in America that are different from India, like food brands. “Almost all the characters have been given something of Lahiri's own sensitivity to the surfaces of things--the poetry of brand names, for instance, as they strike a person who is beginning to know English well: "Skippy, Hood, Bumble Bee, Land O'Lakes"; or the attractiveness to a bookish girl of "the Modern Library emblem, the dashing, naked, torch-bearing figure,” (Bromwich). Because Gogol is a first generation American, many conflicts arise within his family since his parents cannot fully understand what it is like to grow up in America. Gogol develops a different sense of morals and sense of culture than his parents, never being fully tied down to being a Bengali. The main thing that makes Gogol dislike his culture is the birth or “good” name his parents assigned him when he was born. This “good name” was meant to only be a temporary name for him