Throughout one’s life, memories are created and stored within the your brain. As life goes on, these memories stay within you and occasionally are brought back out in the open. Certain tastes, sounds, sights, touches, and smells trigger the brain and invoke remembrance. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close both give light to the hardships people face in reality by using perspective to illustrate different scenes in the protagonist’s life.
In The Namesake, Gogol Ganguli has trouble finding his identity. Gogol is the nickname that his parents had given him, which becomes his first name. For eighteen years of his life, he believed that his name was too strange and grew up disliking it. Traditions his parents upheld became an embarrassment as he tried to fit in the American society. Readers watch Gogol’s life unfold from the third perspective, getting a sense of his feelings as the story unravels. By viewing his life from the third perspective, readers are able to compare their own lives to the events that occur in Gogol’s life without being too drawn to his emotions. For example, when Gogol finds out how he got his name, I remembered a story one of my elementary school teachers told me of how she was named after her mother’s favorite character in a book. Different moments in Gogol’s life, with the emotions and words Lahiri uses, triggers a memory within a person, be it small or big.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, illustrates the life of a child who had lost his father on 9/11. Oskar Schell sets out on a journey to find the owner of a key that was hidden in a vase, believing that the owner of the key would be able to tell him something about his father. In a way, this adventure that Oskar goes on is a him trying to find closure on the death of his father. Like Lahiri, Foer illustrates Oskar’s story from the third perspective. Readers watch Oskar travel on his journey to find the owner of the key, having their own emotions brought to the surface as Oskar struggles to find closure. Foer creates different scenes of Oskar talking with different people, which can trigger a reader’s memory of past conversations they had before. This may be due to the similarities in the conversation, or the words that were being used in the conversation.
Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Safran Foer both use third perspective to illustrate their novel’s protagonist’s life. The different events they created are different from reality, yet similar. There are different people who are able to sympathize with these characters, making them similar; however, the path their story takes differs from those of Gogol and aOskar. Even so, the stories of Gogol and Oskar triggers, in some way, a memory.
