Analyzing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narrative The Namesake: A Breakthrough Beyond Text

Abstract

Diasporic literature surfaced in the post-colonial era and contributed much to the literary and educational ethos with genres and sub-genres like expatriate writings, immigrant writings, multiculturalism, hybrid writings, and others. This study analyses Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake – as a fictional tale of a hybrid immigrant family that traverses between acculturation and deculturation. The novel is about cultural identities, both real and hyphenated, and about characters and events that oscillate between two extremely opposite cultures. Many diasporic themes emerge such as alienation, marginalization, rootlessness, distant homeland, and expatriate sensibility. The thematic content analysis approach was used to investigate the text by adopting Fairclough's (1989) three-dimension framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA): textual analysis (description), process analysis (interpretation), and social analysis (explanation). This study finds evidence that The Namesake is a perfect specimen of a narrative text that exposes the (diasporic) ideology hidden in its hybridity, hinting at the inter-mingling of two ideologies within a single text. It gives evidence of Fairclough's 'intertextuality' or 'multi-functionality of a text. The findings thus prove that the novel represents the ideology of diaspora from an immigrant's point of view. Towards its contribution to the educational domain, this study recommends that diasporic narratives such as The Namesake can be used to teach CDA techniques for exploring hidden ideologies embedded in a literary text.