Analysis Of Memory, Narrative And Identity By Jhumpa Lahiri

Hron (2010) demonstrates Immigrants are forced to pretend that nothing is happened wrong with them because of migration, they do pretend this before their relatives in the homeland and new people of the host country. They want to create a scenario so people think they are successful after immigration (p, xiv). This very pretending of making a suitable image of a successful immigrant leaves them nowhere. They feel totally shattered and isolated. They suffer for two times they deprive of both voice and understanding of the world of outside and also feel they don’t have any kind of support (Grabhar 72). He further discusses the cultural struggle of immigration is purely because of famous conjecture, comments, universal structure of narratives
She belongs to what Rosemary George says ‘Immigrant genre’ in her book “Memory, Narrative and Identity”. She proclaims that in the ‘Immigrant genre’ the focus of narrative has been always on place and displacement (Rosemary 245). Lahiri’s fiction also focuses on the location and dislocation. Characters leave their country and start to live in a new country. The central narrative is dislocation and location in her books. Rosemary also illustrates that immigrants always feel at home for some time in a foreign country because they see ‘home’ in the search by location. They feel they have become part of their culture and traditions, but this search ends in nothingness they still remain empty handed in a host country. Immigrants are in a condition of war between future, present and also past. They are unable to forget their past, they are not focusing on present life and their future is also vague
Salman Rushdie takes it as a positive experience while Arundhati Roy touches it very briefly. These writers basically talk about diaspora which involves the scattering of people. Bhabani Bhattacharyya has discussed identity in her So Many Hungers but in a different way she used it to describe the clash of social identities in her novel. Bapsi Sidwa’s has also used immigration but she has not played with identities like Lahiri. Arundhati Roy’s use of migration is also different her characters never want to change their identity rather they just want to come back to country. Arundhati’s character Rahel in God of Small Things (1997) goes to America like Gauri Mital in The Lowland (2013), But Rahel never wanted to shift her identity. On the other hand Gauri tries to change her identity. Salman Rushdie uses immigration as a theme but he describes it as a positive experience of life. In Rushdie novels Grimus and Mid Night Children and in Shame identity is also used as an important theme, but in a different way, he says individual’s identity is very important part of universe. His characters are focusing at their own identity, for instance they are searching for self (kesava kumar 4). They all have used immigration as a theme in their respective books but in a different way. What makes lahiri’s fiction more effective and unique is that she has