Nominative Determinism and Immigrant Identity

This paper is an exploring tour through Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake to expose the tug of war between two worlds, one the east and the other the west. The complicated, multicultural identity of an individual nag the person especially for the name tag stuck upon him. Gogol’s rather wacky name irks him. It is with this effect of a name that Gogol attempts to live. Nominative determinism comes to play a role in the novel. Gogol sees his name as both the cause and the symbol of the way he feels as an IndianAmerican, caught between the Bengali heritage of his parents and the American culture he lives in. Together with it, the condition of the mother who feels everything strange in a foreign land is also made a matter of study. The study upon the equipage of the novel gets into the trapped identity of the Diaspora community in general.