Q4 Week 7 Posts A/B

Post A
For this post I thought I would comment on the family and the differences noticed there. A significant quote that I found is, "guests are speaking in Bengali, hollering, arguing, talking on top of one another, the sound of their laughter filling the already crowded rooms...These people, these honorary aunts and uncles of a dozen different surnames, have seen Gogol grow, have surrounded him at his wedding, his father's funeral. He promises to keep in touch with them now that his mother is leaving, not to forget them" (286). Throughout the book there were many different aspects that went along with family and this is one off those. I just thought it was interesting how Gogol has this huge extended family with all these honorary positions with people that aren't truly even related to him. It makes me kind of think of those people as being almost a support group for the first generation of people that went to America such as Ashima. That would also explain why Ashima keeps the diary with the numbers of every person she's met. Also in this way Gogol would have these ties to these people back to India so he could connect with these people and his heritage. This idea of honorary titles seemed unique to me and there are even similarities as well such as godparents.

Post B
Because this is the last post I thought I would comment on what I thought of the book as a whole and the ending as well. Specifically with the ending I saw a strong theme emerge and there's a quote that accompanies it, "as the hours of the evening pass he will grow distracted, anxious to return to his room, to be alone, to read the book he had once forsaken, has abandoned until now. Until moments ago it was destined to disappear from his life altogether, but he has salvaged it by chance, as his father was pulled from a crushed train forty years ago" (291). This really reminded me of All Quiet On The Western Front and the theme of chance. Gogol hasn't even looked at this book that his father gave him decades ago and when their about to throw it out he sees it. Before when he was younger and close minded he hated the thing but because he's grown up now he's sees the importance of it and his name. In general though I thought that the ending was kind of vague and that it left a lot of things open to a sequel possibly. As a whole though I really enjoyed the book because I was able to make a lot of personal connections to it and I would recommend it to anybody who's interested because it's definitley worth reading.