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Example research essay topic: Point Of View Pulitzer Prize - 1,837 words

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Lahiri's Book Every once in a while there appears a new work of fiction with the power to remind us why we read in the first place. With this, a first collection of short stones, Jhumpa Lahiri electrified the literary world. By winning the Pulitzer Prize for 2000 she has assured herself a place of prominence on any book-shelf. Interpreter of Maladies is no idle choice for a title: it carries a subliminal message, both aural and symbolic, for an intense look at the immigrant (East Indian in America) experience. Peopling her stories are the kind of people you'd expect to find: young men crossing the ocean seeking new lives, young couples going back to the land of their ancestors. "The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did. " Lahiri crisscrosses the continents, raking us from the beautiful city of Boston after a snowstorm, to a sun temple in the middle of India and back to university towns in other parts of America. Her settings, her weather and her sharp repartee are as familiar as the aroma of Indian food.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies stands between India and the United States. In her stories about immigrants, Lahiri describes the reactions to changes in cultures, strong connections that keep people tied to their homelands. She also writes about the family ties that pull us into the opposite directions. Lahiri's stories look at people of Indian descent who visit the country, and the difficulties that happen as they start looking for their heritage.

Lahiri explores human relations, and the powerful effect that the heritage has. All the stories are about relationships between parent and child, lovers, American and immigrant, husband and wife. Lahiri's writing style is straightforward and sincere. Things happen in Lahiri's stories without paying much attention to details.

But such an approach does not detract from the enjoyment of the stories. It is worthy to point out the fact that Lahiri's characters are not at a loss for cultural identity but rather relieved when they adjust to their new world and regretful at the separation from their original cultures. The book is a wonderful collection of Indian short stories. The Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri's maiden venture into the world of literature has won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2000. One cannot help admiring her great sense of humor and irony.

While reading the stories, one recognizes similar characters met in real life. These stories tell us about Indian culture, traditions, festival, and customs. Her sentences are often long, but clear and precise. The stories of Jhumpa Lahiri's first book describes India culture through the details of the characters. These characters become fictional testaments to the conflicting world of Indian immigrants in the United States. The title for the book came to Lahiri years before she actually began to formulate it.

She says that the phrase, 'Interpreter of Maladies, ' was the closest ever to poetry. The characters often find themselves in two cultures simultaneously. They are American reality and Indian tradition. The final story of Lahiri's first collection of nine addresses the realities of marriages and the long process of assimilation into American culture from an Indian point of view, Lahiri presents a first person account of an Indian man who arranges for the arrival of his new bride.

The clear differences between his life in a room in this woman's house describes the cultural differences and similarities in the two cultures. States of isolation and living together in order to survive are vivid in this case. At the end of the story, Lahiri introduces the idea of loss of cultural identification through passing generations by mentioning the college aged child of the couple. They bring him home to eat rice with his hands and speak Bengali, which are things they worry about he will no longer do after they die (Lahiri 197). Lahiri presents a family whose connection with their cultural origin has a death with their own end.

It happens because the assimilation of their son into American culture leaves no room for their own cultural orientation. Traveling from India to New England and back again, Lahiri charts the emotional voyages of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations, cultures, religions, and generations. They also speak with universal compassion to everyone who has ever felt like an outsider. Lahiri's stories are emotional games with the focus on the subtleties of the characters' internal processing. Lahiri's stories drive us into the lives of second generation Indians. We can see their struggles and challenges experienced by immigrants.

They live in an alien world, hundreds miles away from home. Their lives lack constant company of family, friends and neighbors in the homes they left behind. However, the characters all come to the US in search of freedom and opportunity and in the story "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, " the narrator captures that sentiment when she says that her mother knew she was "assured a safe life, and easy life, a fine education, every opportunity" in the States.

A young South Asian female living in the US write about the conflicts of culture, modern relationships and memories of a home left behind. I have often felt that conflict myself, not really feeling like I fit into the South Asian crowd raised in the US, nor the ones from India, and feeling a strange affinity to people who in a sense are homeless and find a place in the vast space of the US where one is bound to find someone who shares the same experiences. The other theme that I could relate to was one where there is a conflict between the traditional upbringing and the outlook where freedom of rights and choices have been taken for granted when it came to making decisions about work and relationships. Its almost as if there is a button called tradition in all of us that at the most opportune times clicks us into choices and behaviors that we don't quite know how to handle. In a sense, Lahiri's narratives are about things we are all familiar with, and can relate to, but her style of writing left me feeling like the stories had no real ending, raised questions, with no solutions. She portrays her characters from an objective point of view and is quite non-judgmental about them, but this in a sense conveys a very academic portrayal of her characters and their problems and distances one from their pain.

Lahiri describes common human experiences for the immigrant community, they lack depth in their description leaving me feeling quite disconnected with the characters and their struggles. In one of the stories, Lahiri led us down interesting roads when narrating the challenges faced by modern couples who on one had to concede to an arranged marriage to uphold tradition, and on the other, are confronted with the challenges of Indian Americans building their lives and careers in another country. I enjoyed the momentum and the symbolism of darkness as a gateway to human connection, and yet, was left feeling unfulfilled by the end of it. "This Blessed House" uncovers the fragile boundaries of a marriage when the couple get into a silly squabble over some Christian knickknacks discovered in all corners of their new home. The author quite cleverly emphasizes the omnipresence of Christian symbolism in American life. "My own relation to India is a very natural one, " Lahiri said in an interview. "I find it very easy to reach into my past and write about India, because it is my heritage.

It's in my blood. My family lives in both places. These days there's so much coming and going. It's not the old style of immigration. " Lahiri remembers the time when she left home. We can see the spirit of culture spoken by the writer. Love and devoutness are expressed in every word of her stories: Then we were in the air.

I removed from my hair the marigold leaves and grains of rice that my mother had sprinkled on me for good luck. Using the tip of her ring finger, my mother had put a spot of curd and red s indoor in the center of my forehead. I scrubbed it off as I watched the air-hostess making her way slowly down the aisle toward me. There are nations and nationalities where religion and ethnicity are nearly congruent-this is true of Jews, for example, or Armenians. Memories are long: Serbs see themselves as perpetually at war with the Turks. There are Irish-Americans who think it is a matter of honor to hate the Brits.

Your nationality gives you a kind of ready-made identity, complete with a religion, and some hatreds you are allowed to treat as honorable. A Serb would find it much easier to understand a non believing Serb than, say, a Catholic or Mormon Serb. The nonbeliever has rejected God and religion. But if he had a religion it would have to be Orthodoxy, since that goes with the territory of being Serbian.

America has changed all that for many millions of people. Although we make too much of choice, having too frequently took the idea down to the notion that all choices are equal and all ideas equally valid, in fact, the sense that you are free to pursue what you believe to be right and true, and that this freedom is more important than the fact that you are born into a particular ethnic group. And it cannot but affect even the way we hold on to a tradition. In Lahiri's stories, the freedom of choice and rights of America intercross with the strong ties to native culture and traditions. The personal life of Jhumpa Lahiri is the very prototype of diaspora culture. Having spent more than thirty years in the United States she still feels 'a bit of an outsider. ' Though she has confessed that her days in India are 'a sort of parenthesis' in her life, the fact that she is at heart an Indian cannot be denied.

The stories collected in her debut anthology Interpreter of Maladies deal with the question of identity. Some of the Lahiri's stories have an ending that can be individually tailored to each one's way of thinking. Conclusions should be made by the readers. Interpreter of Maladies brings with it the sent of the Indian soil. Classic, amazing and simply marvelous would be my choice of words to describe this book. Talking about the cultural identity, it should be mentioned that the ties between India and America are very strong.

Despite the great geographical divide between India and the United States, the people are bound by a shared commitment to basic human freedoms, tolerance and pluralism. This way, this identity can be described by this mutual commitments and leads to worldwide cultural enrichment. Bibliography: Lahiri, J. Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc. , 1999.

Payot, S. Cultural Identity within Nation. New York: The Viking Press, 2000. web


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Research essay sample on Point Of View Pulitzer Prize

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