Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Norms of everyday society
Narrative writing about identity
Social norms in the world
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Norms of everyday society
Jasmine
Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940 in Calcutta, India. (Pradhan ) She was born into a wealthy family, which assisted her in her dream of becoming a writer. She lived in India, Europe, the United States, and Canada. Migrating to these countries that are so different from her place of birth enabled her to write very powerful novels on immigrant experiences. Mukherjee’s novels focus on exploring the migration and the feeling of alienation that is experienced by these immigrants. (Pradhan) Her works have explored such themes as isolation, sexism, discrimination, the mistreatment of Indian women, and exploring identities.
In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine, the character shows some similarities to the author, but there are many differences. Both were born in India, but Jasmine was not born into wealth. Jasmine does not have the same resources as Bharati, so it is harder for her to leave her home and to migrate to the United States. One of the similarities between Jasmine and the author is their drive to go after what they want and to not stop until they get it. Bharati’s drive is to become a writer, and Jasmine’s is to go to the United States. Another similarity is their struggle to find their identity when they migrate to the United States. This is one of the major themes in Jasmine.
One important aspect about the novel Jasmine is that it is not written in chronological order. The novel is written as though the main character is remembering events out of sequence. The author employed this method of writing quite efficiently. It was not entirely confusing and it set a mood of anticipation of what is to come.
The novel starts out when Jasmine is a young girl in India. She is consulting an astrol...
... middle of paper ...
...arries his child. This is evidence that she is steering further away from her Indian values.
Someone may say that Jasmine is about a victim struggling in America or that it is about an immigrant who has assimilated herself into becoming an American. I think it is a little bit of both. I think that the main theme of this novel is exploring identities. Jasmine’s struggle in America and her immigrant experience force her to explore within herself and to discover what she is capable of doing in life. Jasmine has many stages in her life. Even her name changes throughout the novel, becoming more American, which corresponded to the stages in her life. Jasmine went through a metamorphoses in this novel in which she had to suffer many terrible and some wonderful events in order to become the person that she is at the end of the novel when she leaves Bud to be with Taylor.
...is an American by virtue but Indian due to her parent’s upbringing. That is the reason why she is referred to being an Indian-American author which she has embraced. Due to the fact Bengali marries within their caste, Lahiri married a Latin American Journalist Alberto Vourvoulias and have two sons, Octivian and Noor. After getting married, Lahiri does not feel the need to be shy about speaking in Bengali or any other language. Currently residing in Rome with her family to feel how immigrants adapt to change and to go experience what her characters and parents do in her short stories. Through writing, Lahiri has discovered the fact she belongs to both the worlds and the generations of Indian-American immigrants will change and bring intense joy. "It has been liberating and brought me some peace to just confront that truth, if not to be able to solve it or answer it.”
There are also foreshadowing events that occurred during the story. One event in particular is when she is in art class and asked to draw a tree and she has difficulty in presenting her ideas until Mr. Freeman asks her to make a collage using random items. After putting the collage together, Mr. Freeman comments that it represents pain. Melinda has difficulty drawing details and life into her trees just like in her own life s...
basis of the plot and themes of this novel. The fond memories she possessed of her mother and the harsh ones of her father are reflected in the thoughts and
Lahiri, a second-generation immigrant, endures the difficulty of living in the middle of her hyphenated label “Indian-American”, whereas she will never fully feel Indian nor fully American, her identity is the combination of her attributes, everything in between.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. Print.
Mukherjee then begins to compare and contrast her sister in a subject-by-subject organization. She states, “…she clings passionately to her Indian citizenship and hopes to go home to India when she...
As the stories progress, each character experiences their own desire for better; they have found something that will better their lives. As they struggle to gain their prize, hardships string into place to hinder their path. Jasmine must overcome the death of her husband to get to America. She must also find her way illegally into the country and settle somewhere suitable. When a man helps her into the country, she is very grateful, but the man rapes her. She kills the man, “the human form beneath it grew smaller and smaller” (Mukherjee 119), and escapes to finish the job she had set out for.
Furthermore, Bharati Mukherjee describes how both her and her sister’s life resemble each other in order to develop her argument that there are multiple ways to belong in a foreign country. For example, using anecdotes, Bharati provides the audience, being lawmakers, a personal view of how she and her sister were before they moved to America. Then, she clearly illustrates how close to being the same person they were in the sentence: “We dressed alike, in saris; we expressed identical views on politics, social issues, love, and marriage in the same Calcutta convent-school accent.”. The explicit description of how they were the same, gives more meaning to the differences expressed later in the essay. Afterwards, Ms. Mukherjee exemplifies how
In her personal essay Mukherjee shows how culture effects someone’s views on the world when she says, “I’ll become a U.S. citizen for now, then change back to Indian when I’m ready to go home. I feel some kind of irrational attachment to India that I don’t to America. Until all this hysteria against illegal immigrants, I was totally happy. Having my green card meant I could visit any place in the world I wanted to and then come back to a job that’s satisfying and that I do very well.”(10). Since Mukherjee was originally from her home of India, the culture she was exposed to followed with her to the U.S. That is the reason for her “irrational attachment” to India and not the U.S., where she had spent most of her life. Her views made her favor India over the
This research study focuses at negotiating the shifting identities of immigrants and their traumas in postcolonial literature with reference to Lahiri’s fiction. The suffering of every immigrant in achieving a shelter and identity in a foreign land often leads to loss of identity. The qualms, agitation and nervousness of immigrants often increase the issues of identity, and immigrants often feel alienated in the midst of exotic land, they even start to think about achieving new identities. Stuart Hall (1987) a famous cultural theorist discusses the issues of cultural identity and migration as he says “Migration is a one way trip. There is no “home” to go back to”. Change in the place and ambience totally change the circumstances in the lives of immigrants in Lahiri’s fiction, they often try to cling to their own cultural identity and costumes. But the cultural effect is often so strong that it deeply affects the identity of immigrants and they ultimately try to change their identities. Immigrants make an absurd attempt to get mingled in the culture of foreign country. Hall discusses “Cultural identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235).
The book will end when the main character turns eighteen and leaves her parents’ home for college. Build on Introduction – 25 to 35 seconds In order to gather some ideas for her story, Nadia began reading other coming-of-age stories. Most of them were novels.
With Indian parents and being raised in America from the age of two, Lahiri states in her essay that in her earlier years “Indian-American” was how she was described as, however, she hardly felt as if she could identify with “either side of the hyphen” (97,98). In other words, having these two cultures present in her life that supposedly made up who she was ended up making her feel that because she fell into both categories she could not fully relate to either culture, causing her to feel alienated. She goes on to say, “As a child I sought perfection and so denied myself the claim to any identity” (98). This thinking is a prime supporter of the correlation between culture and identity because it was culture that affected Lahiri’s claim of identity, even if that claiming was no identity at all. Through the examination of Lahiri’s early life, it is evident that there is a correspondence between identity and
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
Mahasweta Devi, always writes for deprived section of people. She is a loving daughter, a clerk, a lecturer, a journalist, an editor, a novelist, a dramatist and above all an ardent social activist. Her stories bring to the surface not only the misery of the completely ignored tribal people, but also articulate the oppression of w...
V. S. Naipaul, the mouthpiece of displacement and rootlessness is one of the most significant contemporary English Novelists. Of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, and educated in England, Naipaul has been placed as a rootless nomad in the cultural world, always on a voyage to find his identity. The expatriate sensibility of Naipaul haunts him throughout his fiction and other works, he becomes spokesman of emigrants. He delineates the Indian immigrant’s dilemma, his problems and plights in a fast-changing world. In his works one can find the agony of an exile; the pangs of a man in search of meaning and identity: a dare-devil who has tried to explore myths and see through fantasies. Out of his dilemma is born a rich body of writings which has enriched diasporic literature and the English language.