Unaccustomed Earth Duty

Responsibility and duty is a heavy theme throughout this book, highlighting specifically on the responsibility revolving around family. Where in America, there is always a sense of duty to your family, there is always more to be striving for: a better job, more friends, a bigger house. In Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, the emphasis is on Indian families and the duty that them, and their children carry. Lahiri wants to show how the responsibility of an Indian family is generational, and each generation carries duty in a different way.
Throughout Unaccustomed Earth, Ruma spends the majority of the story carrying this heavy responsibility for her family. She feels compelled to keep her mother, who has passed away, alive with her actions.
But, there is a distinct gap between the duty her and her father feel. Her father feels as if his wife’s death came with the responsibility to move on, where Ruma feels like her death came with the responsibility to hold on. Ruma’s father doesn’t understand, because it’s the sense of duty is different. Lahiri emphasizes these differences and conflicts that occur to show the exchange of responsibility is radically different depending on the
Lahiri shows this when the mother tells the narrator, “Don’t think you’ll get away with marrying an American, the way Pranab Kaku did,” (75). This sets up what duty is important on the generation before the narrator. Later, the narrator shows what she values when she said that she “began to pity [her] mother […] She had never worked, and during the day she watched soap operas to pass the time. Her only job, every day, was to clean and cook for my father and me.” (76).
Basically, the narrator felt as if the American sense of duty the ideal. She wanted them to have the life that she thought was best, she felt a sense her mother having a job and being social and having more of a life than her family. While her mother felt as if the duty she felt to her family was her