In both Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake we see the importance of a father figure in the lives of the protagonists. In both stories the main characters are devastated by their fathers’ deaths and try to hold on to them. They try to recount the memories of their fathers to bring them closer to them.
In Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the protagonist, Oskar Schell looks up to is father and is devastated upon his death. Oskar tries to hold on to his father and searches the house for clues that might help him understand his death. Oskar tries to “remember” his father in a couple of ways. Firstly, his expedition to find the lock that matched the key was in my mind a way to remember his father and embrace his memory. Oskar had an ulterior motive to his investigation. Not only did he embark on this journey to find the truth about his father’s death but he felt that by searching he was getting closer to his father. He tries to visit all of the people named Black because he believes that his father may have been associated with them and that they may hold a piece of his father’s memory. Secondly, I believe that the answering machine was, in Oskar’s mind, something that tied him and his father together. He believed that he was the only one who received the message and it made him feel connected to him. The answering machine is the last memory that Oskar has of his father.
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake we see the struggle of an Indo-American Boy in balancing both his new American culture and the culture of his family. Gogol’s very name invokes the remembrance of his father and keeps him close to his heart. We see that growing up Gogol dislikes his name and believes that it has nothing to do with his culture or his ethnicity. When he turns eighteen he upsets his father and changes his name to Nikhil. Later on in the story Gogol hears the story of his father’s near death experience and finally realizes the value of his name. He regrets changing his name and starts to understand the importance of the name Gogol and how it saved his father during the train accident. Later on, Gogol realizes the significance of the gift his father gave him during his fourteenth birthday and how close this gift was to his father’s heart. Gogol finally sees that in his very name rests a piece of his father and all of the memories they shared.
