SUR: 1NameInstitutionAffiliationDateEthnicity/Race/Culture in The Namesake by Jhumpa LahiriGogol in the Novel The Namesakeby Jhumpa LahiriGogol Ganguli is the son to Ashoke Ganguli and Ashima Ganguli who are Bengali immigrants. The character was born in 1968 in Cambridge Massachusetts and was brought up in the suburbs. The childhood of this character is quite unusual due to his name, which is a distinction of Nikolai Gogol who is a Russian writer. The character tries as much as possible to change his original name in college with no success, he was changing from Gogol to Nikhil. After he studies and graduated from Yale, he becomes architecture and begins his work at a firm in New York. Through his life journey, he comes to know himself as a result of a total number of two failing relationships and later on divorce with a Bengali female. It was later on that the fatherto Gogol dies and it dawned upon him the depth and the meaning of a fathers love. He managed to know these through the studying of his namesakes' work(Lahiri). From the book, the name Gogol has a deeper weight of emotions for Ashoke and Gogol. Ashokenamed him Gogol after the famous author and when she nearly passed away from a train wreck as she read the book. It is not only he named him Gogol of because Nikolai Gogol is Ashokes' favourite book writer but also because she is the reason as to why Ashoke is still in the world andwas able to bear the son Gogol. For Gogol, he disliked the name because of several things such
SUR: 2as he never got to understand the meaning of the name Gogol and why he was named like that.
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- The Namesake, Nikolai Gogol, distinction of Nikolai Gogol