Disconcerted Parent-Kin Relationships: A Literary Analysis of Interpreter of Maladies

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Indian heritage forms the basis for her short stories; stories in which she deals with questions of identity, alienation and the plight of those who are culturally displaced. She vividly shows the estrangement and isolation that often afflict first and even second generation immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India, and their American reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, not belonging to either; they are too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. Lahiri delves into the souls of these indelible characters struggling with displacement, guilt, and fear as they try to find a balance between the solace and suffocation of tradition, and the terror and excitement of the future into which they are being thrust. This collection is about Indians settled abroad, and Lahiri addresses their struggles with multicultural upbringing ...

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of being American and their connection to their heritage, and finally older adults who continually struggle to accept their new lives and forget their old. These characters react quite differently to their family, friends, and enemies, comprising an unbiased illustration of how varied Indian immigrants’ personalities are despite their common ethnic background.

Children are crucial to the action of a number of Lahiri’s stories. They serve to illuminate adult characters while, at the same time, they have a definitive role as individuals. In “Mrs Sen’s” story the boy, Eliot, functions as a foil to demonstrate Mrs. Sen’s inability to assimilate into American culture. Although ...

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