When he was a child, he had the opportunity to discard the name gogol, but he missed it because of his ignorance. When he was in high school and college, he realized the difference his name brought to him, so he introduced himself as Nickhil, and officially changed his name, but when his father talked to him on his birthday, he realized The weight of his name once again hesitated. Later, his relationship with Maxine Retliffs (I think the author here is deliberately playing a word game, retliffs reads like reckless, which means that their family does not have such or such culture barriers and identity issues like the Gogol family) is also escaping from him The restricted life in the family escaped from the "defined" life, but due to the sudden death of his father, he once again realized his responsibility to his father and chose to stay with Maxine in the empty house of his deceased father. Thereby returning to Bengali life-style again. Later, Gogol met moushumi, an Indian woman who was educated in the West. This seemed to satisfy not only the expectations of the family, but also his own needs, but in the end it turned out that this was just a wrong marriage. In the one-person narrative chapter, Moushumi used the name "Nikhil" when referring to Gogol. In other words, when she met Gogol for the first time, she met as Gogol. He. Name change, close relationship change) (Another interesting thing is that Gogol himself once had an extramarital affair with a married person. This was an arrangement of heaven?).
All in all, Gogol wants to jump out of the Bengali lifestyle, out of Ganguli’s family prison, and make himself a reckless American like Maxine. But the reality reminds him time and time again that you are Gogol, and you have a very meaningful origin. For your father’s name, you should live the lifestyle of Gogol, not like nikhil (one-night stand with a woman, integration into the life of an American family, marriage with a woman studying literature in Paris, all of which he appeared as nikhil) Time performance). You are just a Bengali, your destiny is like this, and you cannot escape it.
By the way, another character, Ashima, is also a character "defined" by her name. Her name Ashima, as the poster said, means "unfettered and unbounded." Although Ashima has been pursuing the meaning of family all his life, he always puts the family first. She missed Bengali's family, but her relatives and friends left one by one, and she was thousands of miles away from the place where she had lived for 19 years; he wanted to establish his own family in the United States, but the sudden death of her husband made his family impossible. So in the end, she didn't know where her home was. When she finally left her husband to take care of her and wanted to make a decision alone, she decided to live in the United States for half a year and India for half a year. Because she didn’t know which was the real home, he could only split himself in half, each in half, and it seemed that she had two homes, but in fact she didn’t have one, it was just a kind of "unfettered and boundless." "This is the definition of her destiny given by her name.
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