The House at Pemberton Road
The house represents the two stages of the Ganguli, especially Ashima's life. The first stage is the time period when she gets married to Ashoke and is going to give birth to Gogol Ganguli. It is not the home that Ashima imagines when she is back in Calcutta. It is rather small, dull, dark. Here, the people are what she refer to as "foreigners". She isn't familiar with both the people and the culture, and thus missing her time with her family in Calcutta:“For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.” (Lahiri 15). The house, therefore, firstly illustrates the idea of "alienated" that she feels as an immigrant, which is also one of the themes of the novel.
However, the birth of Gogol is what gives a drastical influence on both Ashima and Ashoke's life. They change to energetic people, and are ready to accept everything in order to provide the best up-bringing qualities to their children. They change from filling the house with their own culture to bringing the American cultures inside the family. They start to eat quick American meals for the sake of time instead of grand, traditional meals like before. They also start to celebrate American holidays such as Christmas, etc. The House, in other words, is the place where the best family memories are kept - an idea that Ashima has never thought of before. The House conveys the concept of ever-changing nature, of the Ganguli family individually and the immigrants to American as the whole, in order to fit it with the American culture and society.
The ending of the novel, in which Ashima is leaving the house, signifies another phase of her life. She actually feels saddened by this idea, which means that she has accepted the American culture and now it's one part of her. The house, overall, represents the two themes of the novel: "foreignness" and "adaptability".
1. One of The Namesake Soundtracks - "The Namesake Reprise."
2. A recount of the novel which focuses Ashima's life.
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